A Study On The Relationship Between "the System Of Unit" And Housing Acquisition Of City Residents Under The Background Of The Social Transformation

Since the Chinese Unit phenomenon has been researched for the first time in1980s by Americanscholars Andrew Walder，Unit study has been one of the important research subjects in the field ofChinese study of sociology. With the deepening of the China’s market transition, the function andprospect of the System of Unit and Unit Organization have received more and more academic attentionin transition period. But there is no unanimous opinion on this issue.This paper continues the analysis of this issue from the angle “Housing Acquisition of cityresidents”. As is know to all, housing or housing support is the most important social welfare resourcesthat Unit can offer to its employees in planned economy period. And housing or housing support arecrucial features of Unit status. Therefore, housing or housing support are aspects we should not ignorewhen inspecting Unit status in transitional period.As for the relation between Unit and housing obtainment, according to the related research, thispaper puts forward two hypotheses:“the System of Unit weakening” and “the System of Unitcontinuation”.“The System of Unit weakening” hypothesis suggests that: with the passage of time, theinfluence of state units on the city residents’ house obtainment will decrease gradually, andmarket-oriented and private institutions will make bigger influence. At the same time, market factorssuch as income, education will play more and more manifest role in house obtaining process.“TheSystem of Unit continuation” hypothesis suggests that: with the passage of time, unit factors still playan important role in house obtaining process of urban citizens. State Unit has more supportive powerthan market institutions; Unit with higher administrative status will be more supportive, and accordingly,their employees will have bigger houses and property right.The current researches have individuals as its analysis objectives, and mainly analyze the housesituation of a certain time. These researches lack the attention on the family support to houseobtainment and the periodicity feature of the house system reform. Based on this, this paper makes theSystem of Unit operation as five Unit indexes in family level, namely Communist-family; CommunistParty cadres-family; state unit-family; family unit level; the elite of management-family. And the paperbring the four main periods of the house system reform into analysis model, then the paper surveys theinfluence of family pattern in different periods on house obtainment under the analyzing framework ofthe joint influence of market system and the System of Unit on city residents to obtain housing.Data analyzed in this paper were collected by the research project “China General Social Survey2005（CGSS2005” sponsored by the China Social Science Foundation. This research project was carriedout by Department of Sociology, Renmin University of China&Social Science Division, Hong KongScience and Technology University. CGSS2005picked10372effective samples nationally by randomsampling. According to related research and the database, the paper turns the “acquiring of housing”operation into two indices: whether the residents of the house have the property right and the averagehouse area, and conducts the analysis with Logistic Regression model and Multiple Linear Regression model. The main conclusions are as follows:“The System of Unit weakening” and “the System of Unit continuation” hypothesis are notverified thoroughly. The regression results suggests that the Communist-family and stateunit-family have continuing weakening influence on house obtainment and the market factorssuch as education and income have bigger influence; while the Communist Partycadres-family and the elite of management-family sustain their influence in house obtainment.This indicates that in transitional period, Unit System has multi-dimension and heterogeneity,and different dimension has different influence under transformation. So, the changingprocess of the System of Unit may be far more complicated and plentiful than expected by thevarious theory and analysis.The result of house system reform should be considered dialectically. On one hand, the reformhas achieved big success in that it enhanced the living level and quality of urban citizenscommonly. On the other hand, the reform hasn’t achieved fundamental success in that ithasn’t solve the problem of the house inequality in Unit System period. With the shrinkage ofthe house difference between state unit and market institutions, the Communist Partycadres–family and the elite of management-family still maintain the powerful influence on theobtainment of house resources. This indicates that the redistributed power elites do not losetheir house advantage which formed before the reform of housing, conversely, this advantageremains through all the periods of house system reform.Finally, the author points the innovations and shortages of the paper and the future researchdirection.