Unequal treatment in the rental housing markets of four Chinese megacities

Unequal treatment of tenants in housing markets can create significant economic and social costs. Yet, it has attracted limited attention outside the Western world. In an online correspondence study based on 1,167 email applications to landlords at a major Chinese real estate website, we investigate whether there is unequal treatment in rental housing markets in the four megacities Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen. We find that applications with Uighur-sounding names are approximately seven percentage points less likely to receive a response from landlords and 9.6 percentage points less likely to be offered a showing compared to applications with Han Chinese names. Additional information on white-collar work or a long-term residence perspective in the city does not eliminate differences in landlords’ responses to names, therewith rejecting the idea of statistical discrimination on income or residence permits. We discuss possible extensions of the experimental design and conclude that the unequal treatment of different ethnic groups may pose an important future challenge to housing market regulation in urban China.