Lives in the Interstices: The Underground Market of Fraudulent Public Housing Access in China

Bowen Li, Zhejiang University

Interstitial space has been understood as breeding opportunities for potential challengers to existing institutionalized powers. In this study, I seek to extend the focus to the powerless residents in the modern bureaucratic state's interstitial space. The shift in theoretical focus draws on my investigation of the symbiosis of an extraordinarily inclusive public housing regime and a large-scale underground market of fraudulent access in urban Chongqing, China. Although the inclusive welfare regime extends an uncommon offer to lower-class urban residents, these potential applicants raise the demand for fraudulent access since their informal social relations are invisible to the welfare bureaucracy who only process formal documents. Opportunistic brokers respond by providing forged documents that the ignorant welfare bureaucracy cannot disprove due to its lack of insight into the informal world. I use the case to demonstrate that in a society where the formalization of social relations is widely institutionalized, the informal world constitutes an interstitial space which the state has less knowledge of or control over. The interstitial space creates an excluding and stratifying condition for its powerless dwellers: they must resort to costly, unconventional, and sometimes illegal means to navigate formal bureaucratic systems, which could be designed to serve their interests in the first place.

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 Presented in Session 1. Welfare, States, and Security