Nation Branding for China: Global Brokers in International Real Estate in China

Abstract

In this article I examine "nation branding" strategies in the marketing of international real estate in China. In their push to secure Chinese customers on global markets worldwide, many Western corporate actors incorporate commercial strategies that aim to enhance the appeal of the nations and cities where the sale properties are located. Their marketing narratives equate investment in foreign real estate with an investment in "quality of life", and promote the figure of the "immigrant investor" as a way of belonging to foreign countries. The analysis focuses on the competing narratives, insecurities and hesitations of foreign real estate agencies working on China's international real estate market. The article is based on fieldwork I conducted in China between 2014 and 2016, observing international real estate trade shows, conducting interviews with real estate agents, and reviewing promotional materials. [International Real Estate; China; Nation Branding; Global Brokers; Immigrant Investor] M ay 2016. I visit an international real estate trade show in Shanghai. I'm sitting inside a small booth chatting with Alex Brown, a sixty-year-old American real estate agent who specializes in the sale of luxury properties and golf fields in California. At times, Alex interrupts our conversation to focus on visitors watching images flash on a big flat screen television or peruse the many brochures laid out on the countertop. Alex does not speak Mandarin. He addresses the people who come by his booth in English, and if they don't understand, he quickly gestures for Suny, his Taiwanese colleague, to assist them. Alex tells me that this is the second time he has participated in this kind of trade show in China, and that he has many contacts with Chinese clients in California. One of the main things he has learned from this experience is that "in China, you should not judge a book by its cover. Everyone is a potential buyer." To illustrate this, Alex points to an old man staring at one of the banners hanging above the booth: "See that guy? He looks like the typical Chinese retiree who worked in the countryside until very recently. But maybe he's actually loaded and can buy a mansion or golf course in California from you." In China, Alex explains, people got rich very quickly but have only recently begun to

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“…It also means to take seriously Brenda Chalfin's (2010) admonition that we carefully consider the ways in which state authority and presence have been dramatically transformed by decades of austerity and open market reforms, rather than assume a temporality of decay and decline (see also Boone 1990; Clark 2005; Elyachar 2005; Hibou 2004; Roitman 2005). My vantage point within APIX offered particular insights into the emergent role of states as “entrepreneurial subjects” responsible for branding the nation to attract global capital (Graan 2013), an increasingly pervasive phenomenon throughout the Global North and South (Badaró 2020; Jansen 2008; Kaneva 2011; Manning 2010). As institutions like APIX crop up in Africa and around the world—there are in fact hundreds of affiliated investment agencies of this sort—we require careful ethnographic work to understand how local and global imperatives, histories, and vocabularies are melded and fused to produce new state forms, and how these emergent governing bodies come to shape policy and engage internationally.…”