ABSTRACT
Within three decades, the People's Republic of China has altered from a mass public rental society, in which private homeownership and commercial housing developments were discouraged by the socialist government, to an ultra-ownership society in which they are fervently championed by policy-makers, entrepreneurs and, arguably, even by the majority of ordinary Chinese people. The informants had stayed in Xiamen from a few to over ten years and earned their living as manufacturing industry workers, office workers or in menial service-sector jobs. Interconnected with China's market-socialist land arrangements is another peculiarity of the Chinese urban growth machine that relates to the persistent hukou system. The concept of home has been a subject of interest in different schools of thought from subject-philosophical ponderings over dwelling in the world to ethnographies on the materialities and meanings of a house/apartment for inhabitants.
