A Persistent Paomo: Images of Emptiness and the Chinese Housing Market 

Is there a housing bubble in the People’s Republic of China? With increasing regularity, scholars, commentators, and journalists writing in English can be counted on to use the existence of empty houses to argue that the current real estate market is a bubble just about to burst. Nevertheless, these claims (and claims like them) have been being made for nearly 15 years now, and the Chinese housing market has yet to “pop” in a way remotely comparable to the housing market crash of 2007 and 2008 in the United States. In this article, I draw on 24 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted among real estate professionals, wealthy entrepreneurs, and aspiring homeowners in Zhengzhou, Henan as well as papers from economics to argue three points. First, I show that the use of empty houses as an indicator of bubble-ness is misguided in the PRC where there is no holding cost for residential property. Second, I show that keeping houses empty has a particular cultural significance in Zhengzhou, where empty houses are seen in opposition to nonexistent houses rather than to occupied houses. Finally, I make a connection between empty houses in the PRC and unoccupied luxury condos, apartments, and mansions in markets like Vancouver to show how the PRC’s “pressure cooker” market is exporting the empty house as a cultural artifact.

The Speaker

Megan Steffen recently graduated from Princeton University with a PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology from the Department of Anthropology. She completed her BA at Boston University where she won the University Professors Program Prize for Outstanding Undergraduate Thesis for her thesis, Visions of Chinese Nationalism: The Beijing 2008 Olympics and China’s National Identity. Her PhD dissertation, Unpredictability, Sociality, and Decision-Making in an Accelerating Chinese City, examines how people in Zhengzhou, the capital of Henan Province in the PRC dealt with unpredictable events. Its conclusions are based on over 24 months of participant-observation fieldwork conducted in Zhengzhou and its surrounding areas over the course of three years. Her work brings classical anthropological texts describing theories of causality together with contemporary ethnographies of emerging markets and newly capitalist societies. Her research interests include the history of the anthropology of China, the anthropology of group formation, ethnographic methods, visual culture, social mobility, and economic anthropology.