Mengqi Wang, "Anxious Homes: Inflexible Demand and China's Housing Market" (Cornell UP, 2026)

About this episode

Mengqi Wang discusses her book on the dynamics of homeownership and the housing market in China.

Anxious Homes: Inflexible Demand and China's Housing Market (Cornell UP, 2026) is a study of the power that shapes the forms of the homes Chinese citizens strive for and the possible paths they may take to realize their home ownership dreams. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, Mengqi Wang discusses how the Chinese real estate industry functions in the everyday, welding aspirational middle-class families, especially migrant families, to the property-owning class and the urban growth machine. Urban housing was a socialist benefit in China until the market reforms and privatization in the 1990s. Today, most Chinese citizens consider homeownership a necessity rather than an economic privilege. Wang analyzes the making of homeownership ideologies through "inflexible demand" (gangxu)—a concept that real estate brokers, developers, homebuyers, and the government in China use to craft homeownership as indispensable for fulfilling dreams of urban citizenship. The ethnography shows that gangxu helps to articulate diverse attempts to accumulate value through housing at China's urbanizing city periphery, while giving shape to a housing-based, postsocialist right to the city. Anxious…

People in this episode

Host: Marshall Poe

Guest: Mengqi Wang

Topics covered

• housing market
• China
• urban citizenship
• homeownership
• economic anthropology

Keywords

• homeownership
• real estate
• urban growth
• ethnography
• inflexible demand

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Duke Kunshan University, Cornell UP

Books & works: Anxious Homes: Inflexible Demand and China's Housing Market

Places: China, urban

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