Suburban Beijing: Housing and Consumption in Contemporary China

"Suburban Beijing offers a timely, vivid, and fresh account and a thoughtful analysis of urban housing in China. Friederike Fleischer, a perceptive and careful researcher, draws on firsthand observations, with informative reviews of literature, history, and geography, skillfully weaving a contemporary portrait in both history and location."---Wang Feng, author of Boundaries and Categories: Rising Inequality in Post-Socialist Urban China

In the last decade of the twentieth century, one of the most fundamental changes in urban China was the expansion and privatization of housing, with per capita housing space increasing by more than 50 percent. As a result, ordinary citizens in urban China started to cultivate personal space and had a new incentive to make more money, and wealth became stratified.

Suburban Beijing documents this process, analyzing its underlying forces and its ramifications for redefining the Chinese social landscape. Friederike Fleischer depicts how residents of Wangjing, a Beijing suburb, have been affected by the recent transformation in their housing, showing how the suburb developed from its antecedents as a Maoist industrial production zone to its present status as China's first middle-class residential area.

The new suburban middle class lives side by side with retired workers and rural-to-urban migrants. Fleischer describes how all three groups share the same neighborhood, highlighting both the similarities and the growing differences among these groups of suburban residents in a rapidly evolving China.

Friederike Fleischer is assistant professor of anthropology at the Universidad de los Andes, Bogota, Colombia, and an associate at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Germany.