Scottish Centre for China Research

This talk argues that China’s urban accumulation has been relying on the formation of its homeownership ideologies—developed in recent decades after its housing marketization reform—that view the residential property, paradoxically, as an inalienable and indispensable possession. The research traces the circulation of the vernacular concept called “gangxu/inflexible demand” in an emerging market of housing at the urban periphery of east Nanjing from 2013 to 2015. During this time, I conducted fieldwork studying how various actors, including government officials, developers, buyers, and real estate brokers, use “gangxu/inflexible demand” to refer to—and construct—a need for the ownership of a primary home for all urban citizens. My primary interlocutors are a group of real estate brokers who specialized in selling properties to low-income families who are presumed to have an “inflexible demand” for a first home in Nanjing. Such extractive practices targeting property-less Chinese families, I argue, produce the urban periphery as both a space and a form and product of social relationships in contemporary China. The talk is based on a forthcoming book titled Anxious Homes: Inflexible Demand and China’s Housing Market (Cornell University Press 2026).