Unfinished construction projects are among the most visible manifestations of developmental mismanagement. After China's central government abruptly restricted real estate financing in June 2022, the phenomenon of partially constructed residential buildings reached crisis proportions nationally, as homeowners boycotted making mortgage payments and demanded compensation for their losses. Drawing on online ethnography, on-site fieldwork in nine cities, and 69 interviews with homeowners, urban villagers, developers, builders, financial investors, financiers, technocrats in policy banks, government employees, managers in local government financing vehicles, urban planners, and lawyers in 2023 and 2024, this thesis traces the institutional causes of incomplete housing projects dating back to...[ Read more ]

Unfinished construction projects are among the most visible manifestations of developmental mismanagement. After China's central government abruptly restricted real estate financing in June 2022, the phenomenon of partially constructed residential buildings reached crisis proportions nationally, as homeowners boycotted making mortgage payments and demanded compensation for their losses. Drawing on online ethnography, on-site fieldwork in nine cities, and 69 interviews with homeowners, urban villagers, developers, builders, financial investors, financiers, technocrats in policy banks, government employees, managers in local government financing vehicles, urban planners, and lawyers in 2023 and 2024, this thesis traces the institutional causes of incomplete housing projects dating back to the early 1990s and documents local government's coping strategies in addressing the largely unfunded central mandate to solve the recent crisis of unfinished construction projects. The resulting property rights arrangements and predatory outcomes reveal the longstanding presence and mark a deepening of what I term, "organizational predation," as reflected in central and local governments' revenue-maximizing approach to real estate regulations, opportunistic exercise of regulatory power, and ad hoc property rights adjustments. Counterintuitively, organizational predation does not always hinder economic growth, is quasi-legal and institutionalized, and requires strong regulatory capacity and state autonomy, thus deviating from the previous conceptualization of classical predatory state, organizational corruption, and clientelist predatory state. As modern states evolve, party-state predation also develops with a covert facade, thus calling for a dedicated analysis of the phenomenon. From a fiscal perspective, this research highlights the pivotal role that the state plays in the causal chains of generating unfinished residential construction and develops the concept of organizational predatory states to represent a new model of the development of China's political economy under real estate crises and fiscal hardship.

Keywords Predatory state, unfinished construction, real estate, homeowners, property rights, China