New | Q&A on segregation in China’s privatised cities

Researcher Luigi Tomba talks about how China's cities have turned to gated communities to keep their residents in check

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A security guard patrolling along a river bank near a new residential compound in Taiyuan. Photo: Reuters

Published: 12:00pm, 28 Oct 2014Updated: 4:23pm, 30 Oct 2014

Large-scale gated communities dominate the landscape of Chinese cities, sprawling into suburbs and around commercial centres. They often bring together tens of thousands of people of similar levels of wealth and education, who live in anonymity in near identical apartments.

In his new book The Government Next Door, Luigi Tomba, a senior fellow Australian Centre on China in the World at the Australian National University in Canberra, examines how such gated compounds have been used by China’s city governments to segregate and manage their ballooning population and how a real estate downturn could exacerbate simmering social tensions.

How has urban planning changed civil society in China’s cities?

There are several levels in which housing reforms and the real estate boom have impacted Chinese society: The role of cities has changed dramatically, especially after 1978 and even more rapidly from the late 80s and during the 1990s.

We’ve moved away from socialist cities that needed to be places of production to create cities that are places of consumption. That is also part of the rebalancing of the economy and housing was clearly one item of consumption. There is also a question of public revenue generated from real estate development. Then, there is the question of finding new forms of governing society at a time when people have amassed private wealth and property and urban citizens are no longer managed by the socialist work-units.

Can more autonomy and individualism develop in these vast monotonous housing complexes?

There are significant differences in how these communities are governed depending on whether they are wealthy residential estates or old housing compounds for the ailing working class. While there is an increase in the apparent autonomy among homeowners in the big residential communities, the state is still very much in control in poorer communities and tries to maintain a certain level of visibility.

There is a certain level of autonomy but this remains limited to within the gates of the communities. The homeowner associations might be able to change management contracts, but anytime we’ve seen attempts by homeowners across cities to claim a much bigger level of autonomy, we have also seen the government reacting very strongly.

Why have local governments passed some of their duties to private companies in these compounds?

There could be a discussion whether there is a privatisation of governance or not, but certainly there are functions generally performed by neighbourhood committees that are now in the hands of the private management companies that sometimes sign contracts with the local government to perform some services for them.