ABSTRACT

Chinese socialism had constructed an elaborate social structure of inequalities since the establishment of the Communist regime in 1949. In the absence of a market, resources, life chances and welfare benefits were unevenly allocated through bureaucratic redistribution. A series of labour, social and legal reforms have been initiated by the Chinese state to enable this structural transformation of the Chinese labour force. The cornerstone of reform has been the construction of a labour rule of law, which has come up against rampant resistance by local governments whose interests are more aligned with employers and investors than with workers. The trend in housing reform is to turn what was formerly an employee entitlement into a commodity for private ownership. Since 1949, several decades of socialist transformation in cities have basically eradicated private rental housing and substantially reduced owner-occupied housing.