to infrastructure, public green spaces, and transportation are used to boost the domestic demand for new housing. The free-market liberalizations of the Chinese economy have permitted the formation of a brand-new middle class, characterized by increasing incomes and purchasing power and a general pride in their upward mobility. Contrasting sharply with severe Cultural Revolution ideologies, there is a new emphasis in China today on personal life and leisure, and the middle class is the perfect consumer group for this transformative lifestyle advertising.viii The middle class is eager to establish a group identity that displays their economic achievements and market power, and home ownership has been a crucial outlet for this desire. In this next section of my analysis, I want to argue that residency in Thames Town is a way to display this new class identity, and the plans, buildings, infrastructure, and amenities of the town craft a paradigm of middle class lifestyle. Chinese suburbs operate at an ambiguous locus of both independence from and subordinance to the city. Shanghai suburbs offer an escape from the stressful city, with less traffic, less density, safer surroundings, and more pleasant green space. Campanella argues, however, that there is not a strong antiurbanism sentiment like that in the United States (as the American Dream takes place outside the city), but that the city is still the center of orbit for its satellite towns. In a somewhat contradictory fashion, however, the goal is that the city and suburb will be mutually beneficial to each other, in that both will flourish without competing. ix This is understandable because Shanghai suburbs are under the Center City’s jurisdiction, so that any gains made by the local municipalities (revenue from housing development, improved quality of life and desirability of the town) will benefit downtown Shanghai as well. Princeton Journal of East Asian Studies!
Songjiang’s distance from Shanghai, however, prevents easy commuting into the city, and is thus designed to be a selfcontained planet with its own industries (local government and universities) orbiting the sun. The post-Cultural Revolution reforms allowed the middle and upper classes to seek out houses as purchasable status symbols. As of 2010, almost 60 percent of Shanghai residents own their homes, as opposed to virtually zero percent before the 1999 change in land laws, which now allow 40- to 80-year land leases (which, for all intensive purposes, are equated with ownership). x 1978 saw the initial economic reform by Deng Xiaoping, the 1980s featured experimentation of property sales and ownership, and in 1998, Premier Zhu Rongji began widespread the privatization of state housing, introducing tools such as mortgage loans (which are the most important factor in facilitating a property market). These market liberalizations were done to alleviate the overstressed government-operated danwei units and work toward China’s new goal to embrace commercialization and consumption to emerge as a global superpower. Consequently, home ownership has become a desirable commodity with intense emotional and psychological implications. In the article “Marketing the Chinese Dream Home,” authors ChoonPiew Pow and Lily Kong analyze how competitive free-market advertisements for luxury housing developments create and sustain ideologies about the perfect middle class lifestyle. The authors argue that a house is a physical structure while the home is a social and emotional entity, and the luxury home, also known as “symbolic capital,” creates an “actively sought and cultivated” façade where “homeowners are intent on creating an enclave of difference, an aura of distinction, and status for themselves” 79!