Unpacking housing welfare expansion in China: Internal motives, external pressures, and the adoption of inclusive public rental housing policies

This study explores the driving factors behind the expansion of housing welfare expansion by Chinese local governments. We examine how government motives and mid-level directives from provincial authorities influence the inclusion of non-local residents in public rental housing (PRH) policies at the prefectural level. A panel policy dataset was constructed to track the timing of policy adoption across 268 prefecture-level cities between 2010 and 2020. Event-history analysis reveals that the adoption of inclusive PRH policies is shaped by both internal and external forces. Internally, the decision to adopt inclusive PRH policies is significantly influenced by prefecture-level governments’ economic interests in land and housing commodification, rather than by the level of local industrialization or municipal fiscal capacity. Externally, the adoption of inclusive PRH policies is significantly contingent upon provincial directives incorporating performance-based assessment. In contrast, clear provincial policy guidance on migrant inclusion plays a significant role only in influencing the inclusion of specific target populations, while factors such as provincial financial incentives and horizontal competition have little or no impact. Our findings contribute to the literature by clarifying the impact of internal and external forces on the local variation of policy adoption.