Written by an anthropologist, this study examines how a highly selective set of Chinese urbanites face questions about their relation to their homes. Ho Cheuk-Yuet interviewed two categories of people. The first, to which most of the book is devoted, is people who will be displaced from their current homes by a redevelopment project. He focuses specifically on the holdouts (what he calls "nail households"), who have refused multiple offers of compensation in hopes of negotiating a better settlement. He relies on personal interviews of people in two redevelopment projects, where he became familiar with the perspectives of both the holdouts and the minor officials whose job was to make deals with them. The second category is new home buyers, and in this case he focuses on people who are explicitly buying properties for rental and/or speculation on rising prices - small-scale property entrepreneurs. Here the context is a new high-end apartment development where some homeowners perceived that the developer had reneged on the quality (and visual im-pressiveness) of the building entranceways.
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