Young Chinese find it hard to buy a home

A year after graduating from the elite Beijing University, Ms Li, who asked that her full name not be used, has turned into a campus squatter.

The 30-year-old office worker ‘pulled some strings’ with the college housing office to rent a dormitory room. Decent, affordable accommodation in Beijing is too hard to find, she complained.

Soaring property prices across China have driven college leavers to, well, not leave college. These ‘college squatters’ have resorted to living surreptitiously on campus, either by renting rooms from current students or leveraging on their connections.

Despite being in the elite of Chinese society, they find that buying an apartment is increasingly beyond their means.

The struggle to own a home has become such a national nightmare that it was named the top cause of anxiety by half of the three million office workers in 15 cities surveyed by the Chinese Medical Doctors Association.

White-collar workers groan under the yoke of ‘mortgage slavery’, dubbing themselves fang nu (house slaves) who are enslaved by their mortgage burdens.

Young couples who cannot afford to buy matrimonial homes are putting off marriage. Singles are renting ever-shrinking rooms.

One young man even reportedly staged a protest on board the inaugural service on Shanghai’s Line 7 metro.

Sporting a portable tent covered in slogans condemning sky-high property prices, he told sympathetic commuters his tale of woe about not being able to find a marriage partner as he could not afford an apartment.

‘I don’t have an apartment, but I do have a brand new tent,’ a slogan proclaimed.

Disgruntlement over unaffordable property has found expression in rock ‘n’ roll songs in Shanghai like Shanghai Bu Huan Ying Ni (Shanghai Does Not Welcome You) – a play on the 2008 Beijing Olympics theme song Beijing Welcomes You.

Its lyrics depict poor people being sent packing from their homes to make way for luxury houses to be built for rich people – the only ones made to feel welcome.

The Chinese government is well aware of the social tensions being whipped up by mass angst over property.

It recently pulled the plug on an immensely popular drama serial called Snail House, which depicted the trials and tribulations of two sisters, born after 1980, trying to buy property of their own.

One of the sisters becomes a mistress of an official so she can help pay for a house, triggering debate over how much one should sacrifice in the quest to own a home.

It touched a raw nerve with the authorities, who ordered that the script be sent for another round of censorship after it garnered some 30 million video views online.

Source: Straits Times, 16 Dec 2009