From Mao’s House to Our House : A Domestic Revolution Is Under Way in the People’s Republic. : Still, the Chinese House Is Not Yet a Westerner’s Idea of Home.

It was my first visit to a modern home in mainland China, where I had been invited to lecture on housing at Shanghai’s Tongji University. We stood in a small hallway that also served as a dining room; it held a tiny table and three folding chairs. The kitchen nearby was not much larger than a walk-in closet. It contained an enameled cast-iron sink with a single tap protruding from the wall. Beside the sink were a small counter and a hot plate. Outside the kitchen I could see a shallow balcony, whose main function seemed to be to dry clothes. Off the hallway was the bathroom; unabashedly, I looked in. It contained a squatting- type toilet and a sink, but no shower or bath--a metal tub hung on a hook on the wall. As our host showed us around, he told us that he considered himself lucky to have such a modern apartment. He worked as an environmental engineer for the municipality; his wife was a teacher at a day-care center. Since it was a holiday, they were both at home. Their daughter was visiting friends.

“Let’s have some tea,” he said, inviting us into an adjacent room, which was small and crowded, serving not only as a living room but also as the family’s bedroom. Most of the space was taken up by two beds--a double and a single. The room also contained a small desk, a bookshelf and a cupboard squeezed into the corner. There is a traditional Chinese saying that “a beautiful room need not be large, and fragrant flowers need not be many,” but one would have to be a skillful interior decorator indeed to create beauty out of such cramped surroundings. The whole flat occupied by this family of three was considerably smaller than the average American motel unit.

The room was neat and clean but lacked warmth; utility, not beauty, seemed to be its occupants’ main concern. The white walls were bare except for two unframed drawings and a calendar. We sat on uncomfortable folding chairs, drinking jasmine tea; outside, the spring rain beat gently against the windowpane. It was cool in the apartment; I looked for a radiator, but there didn’t seem to be one. My host explained that the Chinese authorities have decided that, to conserve fuel, home heating is not required south of the 35th Parallel. I was glad I was not in this uninsulated building in January, when temperatures regularly fall below freezing.

The small flat, though not exactly cozy, did at least have the basic amenities. There was electricity, running water--albeit also cold--and gas for cooking. Of course, these are ordinary and unremarkable things, everyday conveniences that hardly bear mention.

Wallposters in Beijing and student demonstrations in Shanghai--not indoor plumbing--are what make headlines, and it is easy to forget what a novelty such domestic comforts represent for the majority of Chinese. Sixty years ago, when more than 60% of American homes had electricity (and when more than half of those homes already contained electric irons and vacuum cleaners), most Chinese families lived in the sort of wretched conditions described by the writer Yu Dafu in his 1923 short story, “Nights of Spring Fever.” His protagonist lives in a one-room garret in Shanghai’s International Settlement. His room lacks even a window, let alone facilities for washing or cooking. He eats cold food--bread and bananas-- and once a month treats himself to a public bath. His only possessions are his b1869572979factory girl--is slightly better off. Her room has a window. How these two would have admired the tiny flat I had just seen, its fresh air and sunlight, its electric lamps, its plumbing. How they would have relished the achievements of a domestic revolution, a change as significant as--and probably more lasting than--Mao’s attempt at cultural reform.

A domestic revolution is under way in China, but it is hardly complete. Walking through the narrow lanes linked with tiny hovels, I could see that for many, little has changed in the last 60 years. We were stopped by a man who invited us into his house, where he lived with his wife and child in a room about 10 feet square. We exchanged cigarettes and smoked, sitting on the bed; there was no other furniture except a dresser, on which was balanced a large, improbable cassette player, and a sm1634495520neighbors, a privy, outdoors in the yard, where they also collected water from an outdoor tap and where they did their washing. Cooking was done on the stoop, and as we left, I noticed a small brazier and a pile of briquettes of compressed coal dust outside the door.

Li Dehua, director of the Shanghai Architectural Society, told me that more than a third of the city’s population is still living in overcrowded, pre-Liberation housing. Although the official planning norm for new housing is 60 square feet of living space per inhabitant, in the old neighborhoods of Shanghai the actual amount of living space was half that. (A single bed takes up at least 18 square feet.)

The continued presence of urban slums highlights the problems facing the Chinese authorities. Socialism has promised shelter for everyone, but who is to pay for this new housing? Rents are so low-- typically about $3 or $4 a month--that they don’t even cover the cost of construction. “The rents we collect are only one-third of our maintenance costs,” complained an exasperated housing official in Tianjin, an industrial city near Beijing. “We get the second third from the central government.”

“What about the rest?” I asked.

He shrugged his shoulders. And what is the solution? Not Karl Marx, but Adam Smith.

“We have to recover our investment,” said Luan Quanxun, director of the Tianjin Housing and Estate Research Institute. “We must raise rents. We are even considering privatizing home ownership and offering houses for sale to those who can afford them.”

It is a daring suggestion, and in the busy street markets signs of a growing prosperity indicate that some people can indeed afford a house.

The stores I visited stocked a large variety of products that had previously been available only in the hard-currency Friendship Stores, and to a select few. Now, anyone with cash can purchase a bicycle, moped, radio, cassette player, television, stove, or small refrigerator. Or a washing machine. The washing machine, the first large electric appliance to appear in America (in 1909), is a barometer of domestic change. It signals the presence not only of citywide electric supply but also of disposable income. It also suggests two possibilities-- either that servants are no longer available for tub-washing, which was the case in turn-of-the-century America, or that the woman of the household has less time available for housework.

In China, both conditions are now true. The number of women who work outside the home is probably greater than it is in the United States (where more than half of all women over 16 now have jobs) and has produced similar effects. Day-care centers provide baby-sitting services. Fast-food outlets have sprung up in Chinese cities, and people eat less frequently at home, though the latter phenomenon may be as much the result of tiny rooms as of working mothers.

The growing independence of women has encouraged another change in family life: Elderly parents rarely live with their grown-up children, as they continue to do in many other Asian countries--but live instead in their own homes. Which means, of course, that even more apartments are needed. As for domestic servants, since the advent of Communist rule they have disappeared altogether. They may, however, return in another guise: The China Daily has suggested that, with so many working mothers, there is a need for “home-maintenance workers.”

As in America, all these changes have profoundly affected the domestic atmosphere. And, as in America, there is a questioning of some of the effects of modernization. A recent editorial in Beijing Wanbao, an evening paper, criticized the anonymity and impersonality of high-rise housing and suggested that life in modern housing developments strains the relations between families and affects “the physical and mental health, and intellectual development” of old people and children in particular. The writer went on to praise the more traditional type of courtyard houses, “which have very unique social functions. They form a social network, which centers around courtyards and neighborhoods . . . and represents an important tool for social stability.”

Courtyard houses are a common feature of most cities. From the window of my room in the Overseas China Building in Beijing, I could see that although tall, modern buildings lined the main streets, behind them the inner blocks consisted of clay-tile roofs that gave the appearance of being villages in the middle of the city. The large, one-story courtyard houses, which date from as early as the Ming Dynasty and which belonged to prosperous families, are now subdivided, and their crowded interiors provide even less space than the modern apartment blocks. Nevertheless, the quiet quadrangles, which are entered from the street through heavy wooden gates, provide a sense of neighborliness and domestic privacy that is a welcome respite from the surrounding city.

I visited one of these courtyard houses in the old Chinese quarter of Tianjin. The quadrangle had originally been intended for a single household and was now occupied by seven or eight families. It was a Saturday evening, and many people were at home. A middle-aged lady invited us in; her family of four shared two rooms. I could see vestiges of what had been an elegant interior: dark, wood-paneled walls and round wood columns burnished with age; a Biedermeier dresser. It reminded me that China before Mao had not only consisted of coolies and mandarins but had also included a flourishing bourgeoisie. According to the lady--a bank employee and a longtime resident--the building had not always been so crowded. A large influx of strangers into the quadrangle had occurred during the “disaster,” otherwise known as the Cultural Revolution. Overcrowding was not the only legacy of that troubled period. I noticed that every single ornament in the carved brick gateway and around the still-graceful courtyard had been systematically chipped and defaced.

More than the facades of Chinese homes had been scarred by that neurotic decade of unrest. In many households I felt a sense of newness, as if people were still in the process of setting up house. That was especially true for professionals and university professors, since they had been relocated to the countryside and had had to reassemble their lives, and their homes, upon returning. It was not just a lack of continuity, however, that explained the underlying feeling of improvisation and temporariness in many of the homes. It was as if people were ready to move on, as if they didn’t believe in the permanence of their situation. I felt that it would be many years before the Chinese home recovered its sense of stability and security.