Page 165 - Chinese Woman Living and Working

152 SALLY SARGESON
shall argue in the following section that women’s housing aspirations are also propelling
credit circulation, rural-urban migration and the redistribution of family wealth between
the generations and between sexes.

Who pays? Who profits? Whose house?
There is no doubt that housing consumes a major portion of rural families’ income, and that
much of the credit informally circulating in the countryside is associated with residential
construction and marriage. The average cost of building a new dwelling is equivalent to
between seven and ten years’ combined income for a married couple. High-income
villagers have no difficulty affording mansions and even urban apartments to accommodate
their newly-wed children. Indeed, anticipating the inevitability of post-marital division
and subscribing to the idea that it is desirable to give a new couple a debt-free start to
married life, many prosperous parents put up houses for boys who still are at school
(Knapp and Shen 1992:68).
For the less wealthy, however, the impending marriage of a son might portend
financial ruin. Not only must they upgrade their own habitation in order to demonstrate
their economic and social standing to potential in-laws, but to keep abreast of the
competition they also must help to construct a mansion for the occupancy of their son and
his bride. One elderly woman whom I accompanied as she hurried from her job as a
cleaner in the village offices to spend the last hours of daylight hoeing her contract fields
said that she and her husband had built their three-storey house in order to facilitate her
son’s marriage. They fitted out the third floor apartment with wallpaper, air-
conditioning, television, refrigerator and new lounge and bedroom suites. Their savings
exhausted, she and her husband took up residence on the ground floor among unpainted
concrete walls and the furniture from their old house. Although her son and daughter-in-
law are both doing well in private business, they make no contribution towards household
expenses because they are saving to build their own new house. Another anxious parent
moaned that she and her husband would never be able to save up to build again in time for
her son’s marriage: ‘We only earn around 12,0000 yuan a year, and just in the past six
months we have had to give 3,000 or so to relatives that are building their own houses and
marrying. So we can’t even repay the 80,000 we borrowed to put up this place!’
About one-quarter of survey respondents remarked that the exigency of saving for a
house and marriage necessitates rural-urban migration. Young and middle-aged males are
disproportionately represented in China’s ‘floating population’ and their remittance
payments to the countryside are channelled into house-building (Chan 1999:57–8; Davin
1999:87–8; Zhou 1997:237). By comparison, except for those who come from villages
stricken by poverty or natural disasters, unmarried women remit comparatively little
money to their families. In the case-study sites, new mansions were built with remittances
from parents of both sexes. In the most affluent village, much of the capital for housing
construction came from profits earned by couples who had set up dumpling (jiaozi)
restaurants as far afield as Guangzhou and Chengdu. In the poorest village, new houses
were inhabited by the aged parents and children of people that had ‘gone out’ to work in
factories and on building sites so they could repay housing loans.