Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the social and political life of empty apartments in a Chinese post-industrial city near the China-Russia border, and how their making and unmaking effectuated unexpected “deaths” and “rebirths” of the city.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I take my object of inquiry as the political and social life of empty apartments in a Chinese rust-belt city named Hegang, where I conducted a 14-month ethnographic fieldwork. Originally a city situated in China’s socialist industrial heartland, Hegang started to experience drastic economic and population decline in the 1990s after China’s marketization reforms. Since 2019, however, the city started to witness an unexpected surge of migrants who started purchasing its apartments priced as cheap as 2,000 pounds, as they felt “disillusioned” about lives in China’s urban hubs, and simply hoped to adopt a life of “rest” in Hegang’s apartments.

By following the materialization of these apartments – a process that traversed global economic cycles that could be traced back to the U.S. 2008 subprime crisis – I showcase how 1) construction and destruction of housing was an instrument for the Chinese local state to negotiate its urban future in uncertain times, and 2) (the idea of) homeownership mediated personal temporal frames of precarious present and fantastical futures. I eventually probe into the question of how, in a deteriorating city, the empty apartments as signs of desperation were transformed into harbingers of hope.