How Home Ownership Becomes a Measurement of Inequalities: Analysis of Home Ownership of the Young Generation

Since the beginning of the 21^st century in contemporary China, house prices have been increasing rapidly especially in metropolitan cities like Beijing and Shanghai. The problems of ‘unaffordable houses’ are most significant among people who need to buy their first houses in this period, i.e. the young generation born in the late 1970s and post-1980s. This paper aims to examine how home ownership influences life and work chances in contemporary China. It uses data from both national surveys and survey of the university graduates. The empirical analysis will start with home ownership rate with regard to type of employer, age, household registration and residential areas, which this paper argues to be four most important factors for the segregations in home ownership. The core analysis focuses on the young generation, concerning their differences in expenditure (leisure, holiday and education), car ownership, savings, subjective feelings as well as marriage and work by owning a home or not and living in a metropolitan city or not. The main arguments are people without home ownership are in a relatively disadvantageous position in life quality and even the marriage and labor market, so in the metropolitan cities in China, home ownership has become an important index of socio-economic status or to measure social inequalities.