In Search of Paradise

"An engaging ethnography of the very different ways in which individuals, families, and social strata in China are affected by the experience of homeownership."—Luigi Tomba, ANU College of Asia and the Pacific

Li Zhang is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis. A 2008 Guggenheim Fellow, she is coeditor of Privatizing China: Socialism from Afar, also from Cornell, and author of Strangers in the City.

This book is an excellent ethnography of urban middle-class living in the midst of rapid transformation in China's postsocialism. The validity of Zhang’s ethnography is enhanced by its frankness, her willingness to be honest about those with whom she mingled so closely in her hometown.... Especially given the difficulty in gaining access to the lives of middle-class people, who prefer the privacy of living in gated communities, this book is ethnography at its best. It will be of interest to scholars working in Chinese market transition, class and social stratification, state-society relations, and urban studies, as well as those who are interested in empirically-grounded social and cultural theories.

Yawei Chen:

China's rapid urbanisation process and an emerging real estate market have become an eye-catching phenomenon in academic research. It not only greatly transformed the landscape of Chinese cities, but greatly altered the way urban Chinese live and think about their private space, public space and their traditional communities....Overall, this book is easy to read. It can be used as a textbook for undergraduate or postgraduate students to understand the spatialisation of class. It can also provide rich information to academics seeking to understand how individuals, the state, corporations, homeowners and other social groups reposition themselves during housing regime change in China.

Michael Herzfeld, Harvard University, author of Evicted from Eternity: The Restructuring of Modern Rome:

The emergence of an increasingly assertive Chinese middle class, aware of its rights but selectively attentive to the civic values that speculators and developers frequently trample underfoot, infuses both the analytic precision and the passionate chiaroscuro of In Search of Paradise. Against the appalling backdrop of the construction laborers' living conditions and of massive patterns of eviction and dislocation, Zhang shows how realtors deploy national laws and socialist and environmental values, with a sometimes self-interested cynicism that nevertheless also answers to the drive to generate a wholesale spatial restructuring—from face-lifts to high-rise fortresses—of Chinese society and subjectivity.

Setha Low, Professor of Anthropology, Geography, and Environmental Psychology, CUNY Graduate Center, author of Behind the Gates and On the Plaza:

Li Zhang's perceptive analysis of the 'spatialization of class' and its role in the emergence of a new middle class offers important insights into a Chinese version of modernization and urban development while also uncovering the unstable and complex ways in which spatial transformation creates new forms of identity and experiences of urbanity. Our ability to understand the impact of increasing private home ownership globally depends on this kind of in-depth culturally, politically, and economically informed ethnography. The regional city of Kunming, scarred and deprived of its historical and architectural heritage, becomes the image of modernity and the answer to the dreams of the Chinese middle class and their search for a modern future. But at the same time something is lost and homeowners along with other citizens begin to struggle against the government and private developers who are capitalizing on the remaking of the urban landscape.

Luigi Tomba, ANU College of Asia and the Pacific:

In Search of Paradise is an engaging ethnography of the very different ways in which individuals, families, and social strata are affected by the experience of homeownership. Li Zhang explains how, in the process, they become citizens of a different political order, building responsibilities and elaborating desires. This important book is a significant addition to the literature on China's housing reform and to our understanding of the political and cultural dynamics of urban social change.