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China Housing
Chinese urban dwellers, as a category, receive subsidies on
food, housing, and transportation services. In the 1980s such
subsidies came to occupy an increasingly large share of the state
budget. Even with subsidies, food purchases took the largest share
of household budgets. Rents, in contrast, were very low, seldom
taking more than 5 percent of household income even with water and
electricity charges included. Little new housing was built between
1950 and 1980, and although more urban housing was erected between
1980 and 1985 than in the previous thirty years, housing remained
in short supply. Entire families often lived in one room and shared
cooking and toilet facilities with other families. Marriages were
sometimes delayed until housing became available from the municipal
office or the work unit. Young people were expected to live with
their parents at least until marriage. This was consonant with
traditional family patterns but was also reinforced by the shortage
of housing. The pattern of long-term residential stability and
great pressure on the stock of available housing meant that city
neighborhoods were less stratified by occupation or income than
those of many other countries. Not only were incomes more
egalitarian to begin with, but more money could not buy a bigger or
better equipped apartment. Managers and technical specialists lived
under much the same conditions as manual workers, often in the same
buildings. While many urban families enjoyed higher real incomes in
the 1980s, they usually could not translate those incomes into
better housing, as peasants could.
The combination of full adult employment with a minimal service
sector put heavy burdens on urban households. By the 1980s both the
public and the government recognized the burdens on urban
households and the associated drain on the energies of workers,
managers, and professionals. After 1985 more money was budgeted for
housing and such municipal services as piped-in cooking gas. But
state encouragement of the private or collective service sector had
greater effect. Unemployed urban youth were permitted and sometimes
advised to set up small restaurants or service establishments.
Peasants were permitted to come into cities to sell produce or
local products. Municipal authorities seemed to ignore the movement
of substantial numbers of rural people into the urban service
sector as peddlers, carpenters, and other skilled workers or,
occasionally, as domestic workers. In the mid-1980s the Chinese
press reported an influx of teenage girls from the country seeking
short-term work as housekeepers or nannies. Like other rural
migrants, they usually used ties with relatives or fellow villagers
resident in the city to find positions.
Data as of July 1987
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