Paper short abstract:

The paper traces and analyses the vernacular concept of gangxu, or inflexible demand, that real estate brokers, developers, homebuyers, and the government in China draw on to refer to—and construct—a need for homeownership as an indispensable criterion for fulfilling urban citizenship.

Paper long abstract:

The paper traces the life of the concept of “ganxu” or ‘inflexible demand,” a vernacular concept that real estate brokers, developers, homebuyers, and the government in China draw on to refer to—and construct—an nonnegotiable need for homeownership as an indispensable criterion for fulfilling urban citizenship. It shows how various actors mobilised "inflexible demand" in different ways to articulate a moral economy of housing in China's post-socialist property market. For example, the newlywed couples claimed to have an inflexible demand for homes so they can start a family; migrants pursued homeownership as a necessity to enroll their children to local public schools; brokers marketed low-end properties as “gangxu homes” to low-income buyers; and, during market turbulence, housing protests demanded the government protect the people who bought a home based on inflexible demand. The term also entered official discourse. In 2014, then Prime Minister Li Keqiang made a speech, “Meet the people’s inflexible demand (gangxu) for housing and avoid turbulence in the housing market.” As such, tapping into state strategies, market language, and citizen aspirations, gangxu has become a keyword that helps consolidate popular assumptions about homeownership, form citizen subjectivities, and constitute the residential real estate economy in urban China. Excavating inflexible demand’s various iterations and embedded uses, I argue for an approach to treat homeownership as an affective, economic, and political entitlement constructed in relation to the regime of urban accumulation, the moral economy of housing, and the building of legitimacy for the post-socialist state.