不断扩大的单身人群.docVIP

How Chinas house price bubble is creating a generation of men without wives 不断扩大的单身人群 BEIJING — When Xiaobo Zhang got married in the early 1990s, he and his bride, like millions of other couples across China, were given a small room to live in by his danwei, or work unit. At the time a lecturer at Nankai University in Tianjin, Zhangs room was utilitarian and unremarkable, virtually indistinguishable from the ones inhabited by his colleagues. In a word: average. 20世纪90年代早期张晓波（音）结婚的时候，和其他数百万夫妇一样，他和妻子一起搬进了单位分给他的一间小房子里。当时他是天津南开大学的一名老师，分到的房子实用而普通 几乎和同事们住的房子没什么区别。就一个词:普通。 In the China of the 1990s, which was characterized by a pubescent limbo between the economic reforms of the 1980s and the last decades explosive growth, Zhang recalls that mostly everyone was average. People were neatly packed into work units, generally laboring under the same conditions, eating in the same canteens, and sleeping in the same blocks of industrial-looking housing provided by their employers. There was little disparity in salaries, and few cars and luxury handbags to spend those salaries on. 由于80年代的经济改革及过去10年里经济的迅猛发展，20世纪90年代的中国正处于茫然的青春期。张回忆说，几乎每个人都很普通，大家都穿着整齐的工作服，在同样的环境下工作，在同样的食堂吃饭，在同样的单位发放的工装房里睡觉。每个人的工资也没太大差别，就算有钱也没地方去买车或者奢侈的手提包。 During these times, Zhang explained, occupants paid minimal rent for their work-unit housing -- which was issued based on seniority, family size, and rank -- and could essentially stay in it forever. There was no legal market for buying and selling property in China, even in rural areas without employer-provided housing, where families built their own homes. Then, in 1998, the Chinese real estate market was born. It began with a decision by the Chinese State Council to monetize housing in an attempt to develop a commercial private market for real estate. In other words, instead of just providing apartments for lifetime occupancy, companies, nonprofit organizations, and government agencies began to give their employees the option to purchase the housing they lived