Residential Real Estate Wealth,"Leftover" Women (’shengnü’), And Gender Inequality In Urban China

This dissertation argues that China’s privatization of housing, combined withentrenched patriarchal norms, has produced new gender inequality in wealth as more andmore Chinese buy urban homes. It finds that many women have been shut out of whatmay be the biggest accumulation of real-estate wealth in history, valued at over RMB109trillion (US$17trillion) in2010, according to HSBC. China’s skyrocketing homepricesover the past decade have created new forms of inequality, based on class and onhukou or household registration, but I argue that the greatest inequality of all generatedby the country’s real-estate boom is along gender lines. China’s privatizationof urbanhousing since1998has resulted in an unprecedented and fast accumulation ofresidential real-estate wealth and severely unaffordable urban homes. The buyingstructure of China’s residential real-estate market means that this wealth is largely outof reach for women whose parents are unwilling to help their daughters make the downpayment on an urban home. In spite of China’s rapid economic growth over the pastfew decades and increasingly egalitarian beliefs about gender among the young,“post-80”(balinghou)generation, the outsized importance of parents and elders inpurchasing valuable property for their children has resulted in the transmission ofoutdated and unequal gender norms from the older generation, which has intensifiedpressure on women in their20s and early30s to act against their own economic interestswhen they marry. My findings are drawn from online responses from a total of283peopleacross China to a study conducted on Sina Weibo; in-depth interviews with60people (36women and24men):39in Beijing,18in Shanghai, and three in Xi’an, most of whom areuniversity educated; content analysis of Chinese state media reports; and observation ofsome Beijing housing sales activities. Despite recent gains made by women in education,I argue that expectations about women’s empowerment in China have proven to be overlyoptimistic and that new mechanisms have worked to reconstruct gender inequality.