ABSTRACT
This chapter sheds light on China’s housing system of neo-liberal governmentality through an examination of the policy of home purchase restrictions and people’s responses to it. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Nanjing, it reveals how China’s price control policies, rather than making homes affordable, perpetuate and complicate existing regional inequalities centred on the political and social distinction between city people and migrants. Moreover, rather than following an orthodox neo-liberal path, post-reform China performs housing marketisation through state apparatuses and population management, such as the hukou system, inherited from the socialist era.
