Centre for East Asian Studies

Title of Research: Transformed housing policies in China and their impacts on housing market 

Supervisor (s):Professor Ray Forrest and Dr. Misa Izuhara

In the past few years, Chinese house prices were skyrocketing, which not only happened in developed eastern coastal cities but also in small towns in western provinces. Meanwhile, progress on the housing welfare system was very slow. As a result, it triggered mass complaints while many residents could not afford a common flat. Compared with average income per household in China, the housing market seems to deviate from the main consumer group. At the end of 2007, house prices seemed to reach the peak and show signs of a down-turn. However, housing estate enjoys direct and indirect linkages with many other sectors, such as the financial sector and steel industry, assuming a key driving role inside China’s high-speed developing economy. The depression of the housing market may exercise a great negative influence on other sectors, especially against the backcloth of the recent global economic crisis. With the above background, my research design will be:

• Understand the transformation process of China’s housing policy under the socialistic planned system and reform period.
  
  
• Identify the new emphasis of the transformed China’s housing policy against the background of commercialized housing stock. -The new emphasis of China’s housing policy beyond the reform period.
  - The changed and multiple regulating methods.
  - The housing policy game between china’s central government and local governments.
  - The transformed housing welfare policies.

• Evaluate the housing policy’s effect on China’s excessively commercialized housing market.

Mixed research methods are going to be employed, including literature reviews, discourse analysis, interviews, case studies and quantitative analysis of secondary data.