ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of the impacts of economic reform and urban restructuring on Shanghai’s contemporary urban and housing development. Specifically, I will examine how post-welfare housing reform policies initiated by the central government have led to the emergence of a private housing market centred on the development of commodity housing enclaves targeting the new middle class and nouveau riche in Shanghai. As has been widely documented, contemporary urban development in Shanghai (see Figure 3.1) is directly related to the demise of Maoism in the late 1970s and the establishment of a new economic order by the Chinese Communist Party at the Third Plenum in December 1978 through the implementation of the New Open Door Policy (Y. M. Yeung and Sung, 1996; W. P. Wu, 1999). Initiated by Deng Xiaoping, the main goals of the post-1978 reform policies are, first, to restructure the Chinese economy away from collective forms of ownership and control of the means of production and
towards the growth of individual and private ownership and, second, to increase the allocation of surplus according to market ‘efficiency’ criteria and towards an increasing role for markets in the circulation of goods, services, capital and wage labour. The larger goal of the reform is to mould capitalism into ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ and to transform China into a modern nation-state (Baum, 1996). In large coastal cities and designated economic growth zones, city officials are encouraged to adopt an ‘entrepreneurial’ and ‘pro-business’ outlook to attract investment into their cities and towns (see F. L. Wu, 2003).
