That 60 minutes exposé on the Chinese housing bubble was VERY interesting. I can't help but wonder, why don't squatters come in and take over, French style (a la Jeudi Noir)?
For a little background on Parisian squatters http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-12135687
Nezar's "Urban Informality, a new way off life" shines a little light on that question for me and also helped me understand my frame. As a Latin Americanist, I understand informal housing and labor in the Latin American context: organized and politically pushy (think FMLN in El Salvador or PT in Brazil). So to read about the middle eastern approach of "redress" was a bit of mental shift for me.
That citizens who were acting agains the state in some way (by illegally occupying land or not following code) by trying to sneak a settlement in and then pretend it was always there and is legitimate is really fascinating to me, because it implies implicit cooperation on both sides.
Which brings me back to China. I would assume that a homeless rural migrants staging a political movement around occupying vacant housing owned by China's middle class would not go well for them; perhaps a bit of a non-starter. That leaves the sneak technique, but since the exposé suggested that informal residents were just packing up their bricks and leaving, I have to imagine that the state or maybe the property owners have a system to prevent squatting - i.e. does not have implicit cooperation.
Which begs the question. Where are those people going with their bricks?
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