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Suburban Beijing

Housing and Consumption in Contemporary China

Friederike Fleischer author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:University of Minnesota Press

Published:16th Dec '10

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Suburban Beijing cover

In the last decade of the twentieth century, one of the most fundamental changes in urban China has been the expansion and privatization of housing, with per capita housing space increasing by more than 50 percent. As a result, ordinary citizens in urban China have started to cultivate personal space and have a new incentive to make more money, and wealth is being stratified.
Suburban Beijing documents this process, analyzing its underlying forces and its ramifications for redefining the Chinese social landscape. Friederike Fleischer depicts the way Chinese residents in Wangjing, a Beijing suburb, have been affected by the recent transformation in their housing, showing how the suburb developed from its antecedents as a Maoist industrial production zone to its present status as China's first middle-class residential area.
The new suburban middle class live side by side with retired workers and with rural-to-urban migrants. Fleischer describes how all three groups share the same neighborhood, highlighting both the similarities and the growing differences between these groups of suburban residents in a rapidly evolving China.

"Suburban Beijing offers a timely, vivid, and fresh account and a thoughtful analysis of urban housing in China. Friederike Fleischer, a perceptive and careful researcher, draws on firsthand observations, with informative reviews of literature, history, and geography, skillfully weaving a contemporary portrait in both history and location." —Feng Wang, author of Boundaries and Categories: Rising Inequality in Post-Socialist Urban China

ISBN: 9780816665877

Dimensions: 216mm x 140mm x 15mm

Weight: unknown

256 pages