Post-Mao marketization and commercialization since the early 1980s has produced fundamental transformation of urban social landscapes. One of the most important results of the change is privatization of home ownership. Since the mid-1990s, housing privatization has become one of the central priorities in government policy, and a number of important regulations and announcements have been promulgated. As a popular government slogan put it: “Housing is no longer a welfare item; it is now a commodity!” (p. 36). With the rise of private home ownership, increasingly rights-conscious and assertive middle classes have emerged in urban China.
In Search of Paradise examines this phenomenon through an ethnography of privatizing homeownership and living in Kunming, the capital city of Yunnan Province in southwest China. For a total of fifteen months between 2000 and 2007, Zhang studied the transformative impact of homeownership, meaning of private residential space, attendant lifestyles, and urban governing strategies in...