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This paper examines home financing in China, using data from household surveys conducted in Guangzhou and Shanghai. The nationwide Housing Provident Fund is still of minor importance. The majority of homebuyers continue to rely heavily on personal savings and parental contributions to finance home purchase. Mortgages are gaining importance, with slightly less than one-third of the purchases employing this means. Demographic attributes have relatively minor effects on mortgage loan utilisation. Socio-economic status is of somewhat greater significance; however, it exhibits contrasting effects in Guangzhou and Shanghai, which may be attributed to the difference in local housing market conditions. Migrants are discriminated by their hukou status. The findings show hukou status affects access to mortgage primarily through its impacts on the job market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper uses the concept of citizenship in the social sense of membership and the right to an allocation of resources to examine the urban citizenship of migrants in Chinese metropolises with special reference to Shanghai. Citizenship in the Chinese context is interlocked with the household registration (hukou) system instituted more than 50years ago. The paper tracks the changes in both the defacto and the hukou population in selected Chinese cities in the past 30years to analyze how large the gate of the hukou system has been opened and under what circumstances urban hukou is conferred on migrants. Facing a flood of migration, the Shanghai Municipal Government has introduced a residence card system without challenging the existing hukou system. Blended new wine in an old bottle, a hierarchical structure of population registration and management has been set up leading to a system of citizenship stratification, which allows the municipal government to trade the differential citizenship for talents, capital, and super-low-cost labor and to avoid the social obligations to the non-constituents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increased knowledge in distribution patterns of traffic-related pollutants can help address the problems of air pollution. Utilities of instrumented unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) who have high mobility are an effective approach to investigate the pollutant distributions. However, UAV-based observations are mostly conducted in open suburban areas and have been rare in urban areas where present severe pollution problems. In this study, an instrumented six-rotor UAV was carried out to investigate the spatiotemporal distributions of air pollutants beside an urban arterial road in Shanghai, China. Both vertical and horizontal distributions of particulate matters (PM), carbon monoxide (CO) within the height of 120 m were investigated. Results show that the vertical fall-off of roadside CO was mainly in a height range of 0–60 m and was 0–40 m for PM. PM and CO concentrations both presented exponential decay in the vertical direction and showed more significant decay in traffic rush hours compared with that in non-rush hours. Meanwhile, the concentration of fine particles (PM 1) was mostly affected by the background concentration while the concentrations of coarse particles and CO were more related to traffic activities. Additionally, at the height of 40 m, the horizontal dispersion of CO could reach over 60 m away from the road, and the increase in pollutant concentrations was mainly in the downwind direction of the road. This study revealed the general trends of vertical and horizontal distributions of air pollutants beside an urban arterial road, which could provide implications in mitigating traffic-related air pollution. Image 1 • Distributions of traffic pollutants were investigated by instrumented UAVs. • The vertical fall-off of roadside CO and PM was mainly in 0–60 m and 0–40 m. • Roadside CO and PM concentrations presented exponential decay vertically. • The horizontal distributions of CO and PM were presented in high resolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]