Fanglu
By Songyi Zhang
If you ask a Chinese in his twenties or thirties—are you a fanglu? you’ll be very likely to get a positive answer. These days the number of Chinese fanglu (literally, house slaves) grows as quickly as the domestic economy. They have to work even harder than most people to pay their huge mortgages. My two-month stay in China refreshes my memory of the costly housing.
The property price boom appears across the country, mostly in major cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Chongqing. The real estate market price has gone up double or even triple in less than a decade. Take my home city, Guangzhou, for an example, one square meter on average cost about five thousand RMB (approx. 840 US dollar per 10.8 sq feet) ten years ago. Now, it costs at least ten thousand RMB per square meter. So the price of a two-bedroom flat can easily come up to one million three hundred thousand RMB (approx. two hundred thirty thousand US dollars).
That means to buy a house in China, you have to be a millionaire. But even in the well-developed United States, millionaires only make up about one percent of the total population. In China, there’re many upstarts becoming millionaires in recent years. They create such a bubbly international scene that Chinese people have a shocking power to spend money, buying luxury goods and possessing private vineyards, yachts and jet planes. But the world doesn’t understand how many common people in China are still struggling for a better place to live.
I happened to be in Guangzhou this January when the central government enacted new rules to limit house purchase. Thus, the mortgage interest is higher for those who already own a house and attempt to buy a second or third house. The measures aim to curb the skyrocketing realty investments. As a result, the housing market price in Guangzhou, for instance, came down ten percent in the beginning of the year.
However, that minor decrease doesn’t relieve much of the fanglu’s burden. Today, newlyweds would rather live by themselves than with the husband’s parents. So young couples who plan to get married are under tremendous pressure to purchase a million-yuan-worth flat. By the time they pay off the house, they may turn gray-haired people. While young people can work hard to achieve their goals, the older labor workers may never live in a house of their own. They’re the typical “sandwich class”—neither too underprivileged to receive government housing subsidies, nor sufficiently well off to make the down payment. The housing market price seems to go faster than what they earn and save.
No wonder people often say, those who have a house can afford more, those who don’t have a house can hardly afford one. And between these two extremes live the fanglu struggling under the weight of their mortgages.
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