Materialisation of the Good Life in the New House

Abstract

Over the past two decades, Chinese rural architecture has experienced dramatic changes through the Building the Chinese Socialist New Village movement. Thousands of new houses, particularly in the model of the New Village, have risen abruptly out of the ground. These Western-style new houses with a garden (huayuan yangfang), which often appear in the media as typical family houses in Western society, largely represent the image of the good life of the state and the peasant in contemporary China. In this article, I focus on how the family house is produced and consumed in Baikou New Village in south China. By presenting the materiality of the dwelling space, this paper probes the intertwined processes of the materialisation of the blueprint of the good life and how the new houses influence family life (especially intergenerational relationships) in post-socialist Baikou New Village.