Build for whom? Contested state entrepreneurialism and the governance of affordable rental housing in Shanghai, China

This paper critically interrogates state entrepreneurialism through an empirical analysis of China’s recent Affordable Rental Housing (ARH) programme. Prevailing accounts of social housing under neoliberalism tend to frame it as a residual, market-enabling instrument of welfare retrenchment. Such perspectives, however, inadequately capture contexts in which expanded provision is intertwined with intensified and reconfigured forms of state intervention. Drawing on 92 qualitative interviews in Shanghai, this paper shows how ARH operates as a strategically selective mechanism embedded within broader projects of labour governance and territorial development. While it functions as a spatial fix to absorb oversupplied housing stock amid the crisis tendencies of land-centred accumulation, its implementation reveals a fragmented and contested process of state entrepreneurialism. Intra-state frictions, bureaucratic negotiations and divergent local growth rationalities reproduce uneven and contingent outcomes, rather than a coherent developmental logic. Access to ARH is selectively structured to privilege skilled migrants, demonstrating how state housing provision is mobilised to sort labour and align welfare responsibilities with labour value extraction and urban competitiveness. Meanwhile, hierarchical state-market arrangements reproduce regulatory asymmetries and uneven access. This paper argues that social housing in contemporary China constitutes a contested terrain of accumulation and legitimation, complicating linear narratives of neoliberal convergence and advancing a more critical understanding of state-led housing provision.