Makeshift Houses and Everyday Work: Homemaking in Simple Housing Neighborhoods Under Socialist China 1949-1966

Through examining the construction and maintenance of informal houses during the early PRC, this thesis conceptualizes simple housing neighborhoods as socio-material systems characterized by distinct labor practices and material makeup, serving as sites of social transformation and economic accumulation. The paper shows that the early PRC's lopsided investment in apartment construction and simple housing repair not only allowed such neighborhoods to continue but contributed to the widening of housing inequality. Simple housing remained firmly in private ownership as sites of neglect, underinvestment, and private labor. The drive for rapid accumulation during the GLF incorporated simple housing neighborhoods into the state's "walking on two legs" strategy. The Housing Bureau mobilized residents as repair labor as construction workers were transferred to industrial and housing projects. Walking on two legs for simple housing neighborhoods came to mean mass repairment campaigns through residents' labor that sustained the houses through periods shortage. In the aftermath of the GLF, the state's efforts to establish uniformity in simple housing neighborhoods occurred alongside attempts to consolidate both the rural-urban divide and urban inequalities. Sustaining the houses continued to rely on underpaid collective workers and an underground economy of construction workers.