Page 161 - Chinese Woman Living and Working

148 SALLY SARGESON

Plate 7.1 Villagers’ housing, Hangzhou, 1999 (photograph by author).

Tracing women’s agency in the rural housing boom
Every traveller to the Zhejiang countryside can see that a rural housing boom is
underway. What they are unlikely to realise is just how long the boom has lasted and how
much housing space has been created. As soon as farming incomes increased and building
materials became available in the early 1980s, villagers set about satisfying
accommodation demands that had been suppressed throughout the Maoist period. Within
a few years, land administrators and researchers warned that both land and capital were
being wasted by the annual construction of more than 50 million square metres of floor
space (Zha 1990). Notwithstanding a drop in the rate of growth of rural incomes and
government efforts to rein in construction, official statistics show that the average per
capita living space of Zhejiang villagers continued to increase in the 1990s, reaching more
than 40 square metres by the end of the decade, four times more than the per capita space
available to urban residents and one-third more than the rural average (Zhejiang sheng tudi
guanli ju 1999; Zhongguo gengdi wanli xing 1998: 471; Zhejiang tongji nianjian 1999:184).
Mansions in the rich hinterland of the provincial capital, Hangzhou, loomed six storeys
tall and contained several hundred metres of space.
There is ample evidence that people in each of the five case-study villages participated
enthusiastically in the housing boom. More than half of all households built at least one
new house between 1990 and 2000. Some households had built, demolished and rebuilt
two or even three times during this period. A handful admitted to illegally owning
multiple new residences. Nevertheless, construction continues. Why?