Rediscovering the 'gate' under Market Transition: from Work -unit Compounds to Commodity Housing Enclaves

While the literature emphasizes the ‘global spread’ of gated communities, the physical form of gating exists in the history for a long time. The gate and walls can at least date back to the walled city when the city was used for military defence. Even in the socialist period when egalitarianism was the predominant ideology, enclosed workunit compounds were widely built. However, gating was not a contentious issue precisely because it was not a device for social exclusion. It would therefore be revealing to ask what is so ‘novel’ about the fortress residence from the context of the city with a long history of gating. This paper applies two major explanations in gated community studies, namely the club realm of services and the discourse of fear, to examine the transition from work-unit compounds to gated commodity housing enclaves in urban China. Such a transition is accompanied by the rediscovering of the ‘gate’ as the instrument of partition between derelict socialist landscape produced by ‘economizing urbanization’ and post-socialist imagination of the ‘good life’. As a club realm, the gated community is a response to the state’s retreat from public good provision. While the discourse of fear seems less applicable to the Chinese city, urban fragmentation is paving the way to new urban experience of insecurity in post-reform China.