Title: The Disjuncture of National and Local Policy Strategies in Chinese Cities: Exploring the Interface of Affordable Housing Strategies and Human Capital Market
This research argues that the confounding nature of Sino-capitalism (Peck & Zhang, 2013) is exacerbated by disjuncture between China’s centralised aims and controls and its emerging array of decentralised local governance choices. While the discrepancies within either China’s techno-economic domain (TED) or social-institutional domain (SID) have been discussed (see for example Yeung, 2000), the incoherence between these domains remains overlooked. This study proposes an exploration of the interface between i) labour market policies, underpinning the growth of the knowledge economy and driven by increasingly decentralised TED policies, and ii) the provision of affordable housing, fashioned by centralised SID policies that retain China’s socialist aims for social stability. In the UK housing for key workers remains a concern (Maclennan and O’Sullivan 2013). In China, however, the housing-labour market interface is likely to be more problematic as a result of the potential governance disjuncture – with companies driven by the market logic and households competing for homes in the state system of affordable housing provision. Therefore this research aims to:
(1) Profile Chinese policy evolutions and governance for labour markets and affordable housing;
(2) Identify disjunctures in the different mixes of state-market relations in different regions;
(3) Identify civil society and government responses to emerging problems.