Politics of housing redevelopment in China: The rise and fall of the Ju'er Hutong project in inner-city Beijing

Journal of Housing and the Built Environment 18: 75–87, 2003.© 2003 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

Policy and practice

Politics of housing redevelopment in China:The rise and fall of the Ju’er Hutong project ininner-city Beijing

YAN ZHANG1 and KE FANG2

1Department of Urban Studies and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77Massachusetts Avenue, Room 10-485, Cambridge, MA 02139 (E-mail: [email protected])2Transport and Urban Development, The World Bank, 1818 H Street NW, F4P-400Washington, DC 20433 (E-mail: [email protected])

Received December 2001; Accepted July 2002

Abstract. This paper explores how and why an award-winning, government model of rehabi-litating dilapidated housing – the Ju’er Hutong project – was suspended and not replicatedelsewhere in Beijing. Despite the rhetoric of improving the living conditions for local resi-dents, this paper finds that, under Beijing’s Old and Dilapidated Housing Redevelopment(ODHR) program, local governments and local State-Owned-Enterprises (SOEs) built growthcoalitions to accumulate wealth (exchange value) at the expense of providing local residentswith adequate places to live and work (use value). As a result, housing models with a higherexchange value rather than a higher use value were favored in the environmental decision-making process. This study will offer insight into the politics of housing redevelopment inChina’s transitional economy.

Key words: built environment, historic preservation, inner-city neighborhood revitalization,low-income housing, urban design, urban politics, urban redevelopment

1. Introduction

The Ju’er Hutong project, a government pilot program to rehabilitate dilapi-dated housing in inner-city Beijing, was touted as a successful model ofhousing design by academia and authorities alike. However, it was suspendedafter its second phase; its surprising fate begs the question of how and whythis award-winning, government model of housing renewal was abandonedand not replicated elsewhere in Beijing.

This paper first sketches the socioeconomic context of China as it hasbeen moving from a planned to a market economy. It then traces the riseand fall of the Ju’er Hutong project against the backdrop of Beijing’s Old

76 YAN ZHANG AND KE FANG

and Dilapidated Housing Redevelopment (ODHR) program. By exploringthe underlying values of ODHR’s stakeholders, the paper finds that the Ju’erHutong case exemplifies the notion of places as commodities, as described byJohn Logan and Harvey Molotch in their influential work Urban Fortunes:The Political Economy of Place (1987). Building on their ‘growth machine’concept, this study suggests that, by manipulating real-estate developmentin China’s transitional economy, local governments built growth coalitionswith local State-Owned-Enterprises (SOEs) to maximize exchange value atthe expense of the local community’s use value of the place.

2. Context

In 1978 China boldly embarked on a journey from planned to marketeconomy, with its new pragmatic leadership turning its focus on pursuingeconomic success. To date, the transformation has been experimental andincremental in nature, resulting in a dual system involving both market andadministrative mechanisms. In the late 1980s, primarily due to urban landreforms and housing reforms, real-estate markets began to emerge in citiesacross China (Wu F., 2001). Urban land reforms changed the 40-year-oldpolicy of non-market administrative land allocation by separating land-userights from ownership rights and by allowing those use rights to be sold orleased (Chen, 1999).1 Moreover, urban housing reforms, which started off byintroducing multiple actors to diversify housing investment sources, switchedto encouraging commercialization of new housing construction (Wang andMurie, 1999). As a result, land and buildings have been increasingly treatedas commodities.

With the decentralization of fiscal authority, lower levels of governmenthave gained increasing autonomy over the economic development withintheir jurisdictions. Meanwhile, the central government ceased allocating itsresources for urban development; local governments thus faced tremendouspressure to finance their own budgets. Consequently, once the land salesdemonstrated considerable revenue generation potential, local governmentshad substantial incentives to pursue local prosperity by promoting the real-estate industry. Concurrent with fiscal decentralization, the State-OwnedEnterprises (SOE) reform gave rise to quasi-private, semi-independent enter-prises. In the housing sector, while SOEs were encouraged to compete inthe ever-growing real-estate market, they continued to undertake projectscommanded by the government.

Gradually economic liberation has made resources available for emergingefforts to provide adequate dwellings for inner-city residents who had longbeen neglected. The Beijing Municipal Government, for example, initi-

POLITICS OF HOUSING REDEVELOPMENT IN CHINA 77

ated the Old and Dilapidated Housing Redevelopment (ODHR) programin 1990, aiming to “accelerate old and dilapidated housing renewal andprovide adequate dwellings for inner-city residents” (Quoted in Fang, 2000,p. 25; Abramson, 1997). However, this program quickly became a large-scale speculative form of development involving massive demolition andruthless displacement, resulting in an enormous loss in social and culturalvalues of this ancient city.2 These results are in stark contrast with a prede-cessor to the ODHR program – the Ju’er Hutong project, honored withnumerous awards due to its efficacy for “both preserving and, more important,resuscitating Beijing’s inner-city life during this modern era” (Rowe, 1999,p. x). Ironically, although the government constantly showcases Ju’er as theirposter child for successful inner-city housing redevelopment, the project wassuspended in its third phase.

3. The rise and fall of the Ju’er Hutong project

In 1987, the Beijing Housing Reform Office launched a pilot program totest various approaches to rehabilitating dilapidated inner-city housing.3 Withlimited funding from the municipal government (Yn10 million),4 each of thefour districts that comprise the Old City was expected to nominate a site forrenewal and develop its own way to finance the project.The East Districtgovernment selected the Ju’er Hutong neighborhood. Located to the north-east of the Forbidden City, Ju’er Hutong is part of the Nanluoguxiang Area,one of 25 “Traditional Courtyard Housing Preservation Districts” designatedby the 1982 Master Plan of Beijing. In the design for the rehabilitation ofJu’er Hutong, the chief architect, Professor Liangyong Wu, developed a ‘NewCourtyard Prototype’ (Wu L., 1999, pp. 82–103) that preserves the essence ofthe traditional one-story one-family courtyard concept while accommodatingmultiple families with modern facilities (see Figures 1 and 2).

3.1. Phase I (1988–1990): Invention

The East District government channeled funding in the amount of Yn3.5million to the East District Development Company (EDDC), a local SOEappointed by the district government to implement the project. A housingcooperative consisting of representatives from the government, work units,5

and residents was also established by the district government to assumeresponsibility for collecting additional funds for the construction, mainte-nance, and management of the new courtyard housing (Wu L., 1999). Ofthe 44 original households, 13 (30.5%) returned to occupy their rehabilitatedhomes. Each household paid Yn 350/m2, which was matched by subsidies


of Yn 250/m2 from their employers. Another 17 households, with aid fromthe cooperative, traded their right to return with residents of other inner-city neighborhoods who were willing and able to pay. The remaining 14households voluntarily moved to other areas, where they occupied dwellingsprovided by the government and the EDDC. Phase I yielded 46 new units; 16of these were sold at market rates ranging from Yn 2,000/m2 to Yn 2,500/m2,thereby covering the project’s total development costs (EDDC, 1997).

3.2. Phase II (1991–1992): Awards

After Ju’er Phase I and two other pilots had proved the financial viability ofsuch renewal projects, the Beijing municipal government initiated the city-wide ODHR program to accelerate the housing redevelopment process. In1991, the first group of 37 ODHR projects was selected, involving 3.4 km2 ofland, 1.6 million m2 of housing, and 50,000 families. Among them was PhaseII of the Ju’er Hutong project. While it continued the basic design principlesand financing strategy of Phase I, it encompassed a larger scale (1.14 hectaresof land, 204 households affected) and increased building heights (an averageof 3.87 stories). However, the 48 original households (23.5%) who resettledon-site were concentrated in one of the four clusters with smaller housingunits. These contained fewer amenities compared to the dwellings that weresold primarily to powerful work units and wealthy individuals at market ratesof approximately Yn 4,000/m2. At this time, the project began to receivefavorable reviews in the press and was given six domestic and internationalhonors, including the 1992 World Habitat Award.

3.3. Phase III and IV (1992–1994): Delays and abandonment

In 1992, Beijing issued the Implementation Guidelines for the Land Adminis-tration Law (1989), which officially allowed the sale of land-use rights inBeijing. As a result, land and housing prices skyrocketed in the inner city.6

A year afterwards, a special policy of “allocation first, bidding later” wasenacted for the ODHR projects. This policy permitted local real-estate SOEsto obtain land for housing redevelopment at no upfront cost by deferring leasepayment until the projects’ completion. In 1994, Beijing granted four districtgovernments greater power over the approval of ODHR projects in order toexpedite the program.

It was during this period that Phase III and Phase IV of the Ju’er Hutongproject, involving 7.4 hectares of land and 1024 households in total, beganexperiencing significant construction delays. In 1994, the EDHRC changedthe land-use designation for a small parcel (0.2 ha) to commercial use andtransferred it to a Taiwanese developer who later failed to carry out the devel-


Figure 1. The plan of the Ju’er Hutong project.

Figure 2. A bird-eye view of the Ju’er Hutong project (Phase II).


opment. In 1999, the East District Government bought back that parcel; anew East District welfare center is now under construction there. However,the parcels designated for residential use in the third and fourth phases remainvacant to date.

While much has been written about the Ju’er Hutong project, the discus-sion has focused primarily on the physical aspect of the design model andthe challenges of historic preservation. Little attention has been given to thesocioeconomic and political forces underlying its suspension. The followinganalysis addresses this omission by examining the program through the lensof political economy.

4. Changing values of stakeholders in the ODHR program

Revealing the highly organized interests of economic entities in the construc-tion and reconstruction of urban space, John Logan and Harvey Molotch’s(1987) ‘growth machine’ concept offers one of the most influential analy-tical frameworks of political economy of urban development in the UnitedState (Jonas and Wilson, 1999). Using this model, Logan and Molotch (1987)theorize that, in a market economy, the space that we inhabit and use everyday is not only a human necessity (use value), but also a commodity thatgenerates revenues (exchange value). By manipulating place real estate devel-opment, land-based elites form coalitions to drive urban politics in their questto promote economic growth and capture exchange value at the expense ofdisadvantaged communities’ use value.

Recent attempts to apply the growth machine model to settings outsidethe United States have produced mixed outcomes (see Jonas and Wilson,1999). Some scholars, including Molotch (1999), have identified the majordeterminants of whether the model is appropriate to a particular locality.These factors include the treatment of land as a commodity, decentralizedland-use power, and local elites’ high financial stakes in real estate. Prelimi-nary research suggests that the coming of market economies, as Molotch(1999) has shown with the former Soviet Union’s case, has turned Chinainto growth ‘machines-in-the-making,’ and in many large cities, full-fledgedgrowth machines, that drive policy formation and implementation towardsprivate interests (Zhu, 1999; Zhang and Fang, 2002).

4.1. Government: From gatekeeper to growth machine operator

Throughout China’s transitional period of economic reforms, the redevelop-ment of inner-city housing in Beijing has been controlled by the government.A comparison of the Ju’er Hutong project in its early phases with its


Table 1. Changing values of the local governments in China’s transitional economy

Period Features of Behaviors Roles Values

ODHR

Before 1990 Small-scale Provided land, transitional Transition Production → Use(Ju’er Phase I) experiments housing and initial funds from the

housingprovider togatekeeper

1990–1992 Large-scale Provided land, enacted Gatekeeper Use → Exchange(Ju’er Phase II) redevelopment preferential policies to

developers

Guaranteed basic housingneeds of affectedhouseholds

After 1992 Land speculation Provided land, enacted Growth Exchange(Ju’er Phase III preferential policies to machineand IV) developers operator

Growth machine Encouraged residentsto seek their owntransitional houses

Pursued extra-budgetaryrevenues

later development highlights the paradigm shifts that have occurred in thegovernment over time (see Table 1).

In the initial stages of the Ju’er project, local government had to someextent retained the role it had played in the socialist system – namely,as provider of social welfare. The municipal government formulated plansto improve the living conditions of the residents in inner cities, with thedistrict governments serving as coordinators of those plans. Local govern-ment provided land and initial funding, while adopting preferential policies tobenefit local SOEs in ODHR projects. However, local government also actedas a gatekeeper to protect construction companies against financial losses andto guarantee the provision of basic housing needs for households impacted byredevelopment (Lian, 1995; Fang, 2000).

When the Ju’er Hutong project was ready to be scaled up in 1992,Beijing’s booming real-estate market triggered a transformation of the ODHRprogram. From a non-profit housing rehabilitation effort, it evolved into afor-profit urban redevelopment program. With devolution of state power overland leasing and land use, local governments tried to increase their revenuesby promoting market-driven redevelopment. In contrast to the Ju’er Hutong’sPhase I, the government no longer specified the kind of housing to be builtfor the ODHR projects, nor did it clarify how to deal with relocation issues.7


The relaxation of these policies left an opening for developers to engage innonresidential projects and seek to maximize their profits under the auspicesof the ODHR. In fact, local governments even encouraged, if not forced,residents to relocate to low-quality housing on the outskirts of the city inorder to free up land for the real-estate market. Despite the resulting negativesocial and environmental impacts of this transition, local government adopteda laissez faire attitude and turned into an operator of the growth machine.

Moreover, local government chose to take advantage of the coexistence ofplan and market mechanisms. By continuing its free land supply and favor-able policies for the ODHR program, the government protected local SOEsfrom harsh market disciplines, including the competition from a growing non-state sector. This collaboration between SOEs and developers also compriseda major source of local governments’ extra-budgetary revenues, which areoutside the purview of central government control. For example, justifiedby its nature of a governmental initiative, ODHR projects were exclusivelyundertaken by local real-estate SOEs. As a result, local SOEs monopolize asizable portion of inner city land at extremely low cost in the form of “alloca-tion first, bidding later,” thereby rendering public bidding meaningless.8 Inexchange, ODHR developers were expected to provide employment, housingunits for officials, public projects, and other social services that wouldotherwise be supported by local governments (Wu F., 1999; Fang, 2000).

4.2. Housing development companies (State-owned enterprises): Fromgovernment branch to developer

When the Ju’er Hutong project was initiated, the EDDC was a lower branch ofthe local government. Its major function was to implement the government’sconstruction plans. After a project’s completion, EDDC passed the buildingson to the corresponding government branches for allocation and management.Under reforms intended to increase SOEs’ exposure to market competition,these governmental entities were gradually restructured into real-estate devel-opment companies. Although the governments still appoint their CEOs, SOEswere required to be financially independent. Thus, they not only implementedgovernment plans but also undertook production of commodity housing ontheir own.

Exempted from land-use tax and infrastructure fees, and subsidized by thegovernment and work units, Phase I of the Ju’er project covered its devel-opment cost. Even the developer acknowledged the project’s considerableprofitability in the second phase (Wu L., 1999).9 During the third and fourthphases, as the government’s subsidies were phased out, the EDDC took overthe leading role in the Ju’er Hutong project. Moving away from its conven-tional role as a government branch, the EDDC’s focus shifted to bargaining


Table 2. Comparison between the Ju’er and Guanshuyuan projects

Density (person/ha) Floor Area Ratio Average Story Housing Type

Pre- Post- Pre- Post- Pre- Post- Pre- Post-

redevel- redevel- redevel- redevel- redevel- redevel- redevel- redevel-

opment opment opment opment opment opment opment opment

Ju’er Hutong 426 264 0.58 1.65 1 3.5 courtyard New-(suspended) courtyard

Guanshuyuan 430 666 0.6 2.07 1 4.5 courtyard 4–6 story(completed) walk-up

Source: Interview with EDDC, January 10, 2000.

with the authorities for additional land and preferential treatment (such asreducing the on-site relocation rate and continuing tax exemptions).10 Mostimportantly, instead of the low-rise new courtyard housing project, the EDDCand other SOEs began to pursue more profitable development schemes, suchas high-rise apartments and large-scale commercial projects. In other words,compared to other ODHR projects, Ju’er was simply not profitable enoughafter 1992 when the real-estate market and government policies presentedthe EDDC with ‘better’ investment opportunities. For instance, although theGuanshuyuan project was similar to the Ju’er – notably, both were situatedin historic areas and subjected to similar restrictions on size and height – theJu’er project fell short of the expected profitability of Guanshuyuan (Table 2).

The profile of the EDDC’s development activities over time shows that,like other private-sector developers, the EDDC came to focus on profit-oriented projects, leaving projects like Ju’er Hutong stranded. However,unlike private-sector developers, the EDDC had the additional advantage ofits close ties with governments. This facilitated efforts to acquire free land,obtain approvals, and secure financing and building materials for projects.These advantages made it even easier to make a profit.

4.3. Residents: From beneficiaries to victims

In socialist China, residents impacted by housing redevelopment projectswere usually relocated on-site by the government. Neighborhoods such asJu’er Hutong benefited from renewal activities during the experimental stageof the ODHR program (Rowe, 1999). As ODHR transformed to market-oriented urban redevelopment, local residents affected by the ODHR programhave been increasingly forced out to urban peripheries where infrastructureis inadequate. In fact, in many cases the return rates of local residents weremuch lower than 30%, as in Ju’er Phase I; some even dropped to zero (Zhangand Fang, 2002). With work units and new homebuyers largely bearing the


total development costs of the projects, developers like the EDDC beganseeing relocation and compensation for original residents not as a respon-sibility but as a barrier to higher profits. As increasing numbers of displacedresidents are now suing the governments and protesting against unfair renewalprocesses, the residents are treated as opponents rather than partners in thegovernment’s plan (Fang, 2000).11

The housing cooperative, which had engaged different stakeholders inrenewal processes and warranted benefits for residents, failed to continuedoing so after the second phase of the Ju’er project. To a certain degree,during the first phase the residents involved in the cooperative were consultedand some of their suggestions and concerns were incorporated into thephysical design and financial aspects of the renewal plan (Wu L., 1999).However, the role of the housing cooperative proved to be quite limited, as thecooperative was established by governments and operated by local SOEs, notby residents. Starting from the second phase, the EDDC achieved profitabilityby selling commodity housing and commercial space at market rates. At thatpoint, the housing cooperative was considered unnecessary as a means ofsharing costs with governments, residents, and their work units. At best, thehousing cooperative functioned as a symbol of community participation, withlittle actual power to fight with the business interests that dominated the laterredevelopment process.

5. Conclusions

In the early stage of China’s economic reforms, the government embraced theJu’er Hutong project as a successful effort to improve the housing conditionsof inner-city residents. Although the market mechanism was introduced to theplan economy, use value of inner-city residents was still emphasized while theexchange value of urban land was deemed as the means, not the objective ofneighborhood redevelopment. This endeavor was supported by local SOEs,sub-branches of government, which were en route to an emerging marketeconomy.

When market mechanisms were introduced into China, the ‘exchangevalue’ of land and property was quickly discovered in the marketplace.As local urban development was largely relying on revenues that localitiesgenerated themselves, local governments subsequently utilized their newlygained power over land development to reap economic and political gains.Local SOEs, quasi-private entrepreneurs, capitalized on their connectionswith local governments, turning inner cities into centers for land speculationand fortune-making. As a result, economic growth became the real motivationfor emerging political coalitions between local government and local enter-


prises. The interests of the residents, the intended beneficiaries who have hadlittle voice in the redevelopment process, were largely sacrificed. Despite theODHR’s rhetoric of improving the living conditions of residents in Beijing,redevelopment plans with a higher exchange value rather than a higher usevalue came to be favored in the environmental decision-making process.

The case of the Ju’er Hutong project illustrates that neighborhood revitali-zation is inherently a profoundly value-laden process in which a societyredistributes power and resources. Therefore, it is crucial that the politicalnature of urban development be recognized and articulated by the public.Clearly, effective mechanisms are badly needed to counterbalance the ‘growthmachine’ and protect the rights of local communities in the redevelopmentprocess in China. Experience from the demise of the urban renewal programin the United States suggests that the interests of the disadvantaged may beprotected through alliances among the under-represented segments of society.However, in China’s transitional economy, a strong civil society, which canfight for neighborhood revitalization and which gives priority to ‘use value’rather than ‘exchange value,’ has yet to emerge.

Acknowledgement

This paper has been greatly enriched by Professors Frank Levy, MartinRein, Dennis Frenchman, and Lawrence Vale, as well as Ambika AnandProkop, Paul Prokop, Laurie Goldman, Gretchen Weisman, T. Luke Young,and Raja Shankar from MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning.The authors are very grateful for their encouragement, patience, time, andvaluable insights.

Notes

1 As stated in the Land Administrative Law issued in 1988, although all urban land in China isowned by the state, the land-use rights can be leased and transferred. The methods for leasinguse rights are negotiation, tender, and auction.2 Beijing has a history of more than 3,000 years as a city and had functioned as China’scapital since the Jin dynasty (1115–1234). The inner city of Beijing, also called Old Beijing,is “an unparalleled masterpiece of urban planning” (Liang, 1951, p. 519). It is located insidethe Second Ring Road where the former city wall once stood. Today, the area consists ofprimarily old structures of wood and bricks that were the one-story courtyard houses of theMing (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) dynasties (Hou, 1988).3 The significant deterioration of inner-city housing in Beijing from the 1950s to 1980s canbe attributed to several factors. In China’s former planned economy, the provision of urbanhousing was a welfare undertaking of the state. However, in reality, the state directed few


resources to the housing sector due to its mandate “production first, livelihood second.” Mean-while, the population of Beijing’s inner city continued to expand, and consequently the innercity suffered severe housing shortages. In response, traditional courtyard houses originallyintended for single-family use were subdivided to accommodate 2–15 unrelated households.4 The exchange rate between RMB Yuan (Yn) and the US dollar ($) is approximately 1 : 8.5 Work unit (danwei) refers to a variety of state-owned enterprises and institutions wheremost urban residents were employed in the centralized economic system in pre-reform China.6 For example, in 1995, the price of office space in the inner city rose to $3000/m2

from $400/m2 in 1992; the price of residential space soared to $900–$1200/m2from $400–$500/m2in 1992. (Leaf, 1995; Wang and Wang, 1995)7 The EDHRC attributed the suspension of Ju’er to a number of requirements set up duringPhase I and II, while the reputation of this project makes it hard to change them. For example,more than two-thirds of the original households were required to return.8 According to the Benchmark Prices in Beijing issued by Beijing Land Authority in 1993and 1995, the minimum sale price for parcels in the inner city was Yn 3200–5400/m2 forcommercial use, Yn 3000–4600/m2 for apartment use, and Yn 2000–2700/m2 for residentialuse.9 The East District Development Company (EDDC) later regretted entering the housingmarket too early. Had they waited six months longer, the sales price could easily have been ashigh as Yn 6,000/m2 to Yn 7,000/m2, given the location and reputation of the project.10 As documented by its 1997 financial report, the EDDC cheated on the project cost byadding 100 extra households to inflate the costs of relocation.11 The residents have won none of the cases.

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Documents

Politics of housing redevelopment in China: The rise and fall of the Ju'er Hutong project in inner-city Beijing