Iwa ni Hana

The modern Chinese middle-class home is just like the housing arrangement during the Warring States Period.

I once read somewhere that if one were to travel back in time to the kingdom of Han [韓], one would most likely to find that ordinary people did not live in houses on the land they farmed on. Instead, people lived in walled-in towns and traveled everyday to the plot of land they farmed.

Nightview of Haining Lily Apartments developed by the company Greentown China

If one were to travel to China in 2009, one would most likely find that middle-class people lived in privately developed housing projects similar to the “Lily Apartments” series developed by Greentown China. These “Lily Apartments” have been built in first-tier cities such as Beijing, as well as second-tier cities such as Haining, Zhenzhou and Hefei. Essentially, they are housing projects that have the capacity of containing 1,000 – 1,500 households. Naturally, they are gated communities for which you need a security pass to get in.

Take Beijing Lily Apartments, for example. You can see pictures of the place from the official website here. Within its walls, you would find just about anything you would expect in a small town – a shopping arcade, a park, a clubhouse, and even its own kindergarten and elementary school. You can also check out Greentown China’s official website to find out more about their projects in various cities. There are too many other similar companies developing housing projects just like the Lily Apartments for me to remember them all. My point is, that is what the typical middle-class Chinese home looks like these days. Just to stress this point, you can explore the websites of some of the latest projects in Shenzhen here, here, and here – and even then I have to emphasize that they are but a small sample of the whole building boom across the country. (I even remember hearing about several housing projects that come with their own medical clinics, though their names escaped me just now.)

From these walled-in communities, middle-class adults commune to their place of work, leaving behind the very young and the elderly within those walls. One thing I noticed is that clusters of families tend to reside in the same housing project – for example, a young couple’s apartment may only be separated from those of their parents by a park or an artificial lake. There is industrial efficiency behind this arrangement because skilled women of working age can work outside the home, leaving the care of young children to either their grandparents or child-carers within the community. There is also a more humane way of life behind this arrangement, because the elderly need not be sent to state-run care homes where they only get to meet other elderly folks and are basically left to die off on their own. Instead they can live within the eyesight of people of all ages and have ready medical assistance nearby. Of course, whether life on the individual level is really that ideal is another matter – but in the very least, the architectural design makes the ideal seem attainable. Within those walls, you have order and civilization. Outside those walls, the typical chaos of modern Chinese life.

Not that I went in to look at those gated communities with wide-mouthed wonder, when the time came for me to look for a place to buy for my parents to live in in their old age. I am not a first-time buyer. I bought and sold one apartment before (it was old, decrepit, cheap but had risen by 15% in value by the time I sold it). Then I upgraded to my current apartment two year ago (which comes with a clubhouse, a swimming pool, a gym, a park and sauna facilities etc and had risen by 40% in value since I bought it). There was a time shortly after I graduated from university during which I thought about home ownership so much, that I worked two jobs to save more money for it. I think I was lucky to be able to get on the property ladder back in 2006 when the property market in Hong Kong was just recovering from its dramatic fall since the Asian Financial Crisis 1997-1998 and the SARS epidemic in 2003. It was also a time of easy credit back then when you used to be able to get free gifts of Samsung Mp3 players or DVD players just for applying for a credit card. I was doubtful that such a time of easy credit would last back then, and I am now doubtful that such easy credit would return anytime soon. So I was very determined to own my own home. (My idea is that by the time I retire, I should have paid off the mortgage of at least one home, or have the cash equivalent to buy such a home.) Having a job that offers a mortgage loan as part of the pay package also steered me towards that direction (even though I never made use of it). Part of the reason is that my twenty-something peer group at work also had the same pay package and are likewise homeowners, so the noise-level of sentimental fluff like buying a home is a decision “two people” make around me is extremely low. (I think a lot of unmarried young women make bad financial decisions, or delay in making good financial decisions because of that.)

So I have been watching the property market in Hong Kong and China with interest for several years now, paying special attention to (among other things) the aesthetic front. It seems fair to say that the taste of buyers have grown more sophisticated. A few years ago, there used to be a lot housing projects that were like theme parks a lá Disneyland, and the colour coordination could do with a lot of improvement. These days I seem to detect a popular preference for something more on the lines of Piccadilly’s Burlington House. Never mind that the aesthetics of Burlington House seemed to have fallen out of popular taste that I imagine architects in the West would sooner drown themselves in their cereal bowls than to design to a building with those bygone ideas of beauty, proportion and harmony. But then if I were permitted to make one generalization about China at large – it is that no artistic style really goes out of fashion in that country (I discussed that at greater length in my previous post here). If you are a publisher looking for an hitherto thinly-researched theme on which to publish your next coffee-table book, I would recommend to you stylistic evolution of the Chinese middle-class home since 1977.

But speaking of trends, I think there is more to the Chinese Dream as represented by these middle-class homes in gated communities. If one ever were to look at the minutes of meetings held by home-owner committees at some of these housing projects, one would have mistaken the minutes for those of a municipal townhall meeting. There are discussions of garbage collection, complaints about sanitary conditions, or debates about rules for parking bicycles etc. Such meetings used to be uncommon a few years ago, but are increasingly adapted as a forum for disgruntled owners to voice their concerns. The management fees home-owners pay to the property management is in effect a kind of municipal tax, and these housing projects are in essence “polities” within a bigger “nation state”.

In this light, I wonder if it is possible to twist the motto of the American Revolution into “no representation without home ownership” to characterize Chinese middle-class living in the 2010s.

With these idle thoughts, I end my last blog post before 2009 comes to an end. Can you believe that 2010 is already upon us? How time flies indeed.