‘‘My life is elsewhere’’: social exclusion and rural migrants’ consumption of homeownership in contemporary China Yang Zhan 1,2 Published online: 4 November 2015 Ó Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015 Abstract This paper examines the consumption of homeownership by migrant workers who are long-time residents in Beijing, but purchase real estate properties elsewhere. Most of these workers do not plan to move into their properties any time soon. So for them, homes are less the space they physically inhabit, but rather what anchors their hopes and aspirations and thus transform their class identities by generating feelings of security, fulfillment, and upward social mobility. This paper examines how social exclusion in the urban village and the lure of a booming real estate market cultivate a rural migrant desire for homeownership elsewhere. Many use homeownership as a remedy for their ‘‘in-between status’’ and assume that owning an urban home will allow them to move from migrant laborer to urban consumer. However, this rural migrant ‘‘in-between status’’ is not the result of a lack of affordable and decent places to live, but rather the outcome of being incorporated into a spatially divided production/consumption regime. As a result, not only does owning a home somewhere cannot put an end to their ‘‘in-between status,’’ but also it intensifies their experience of being ‘‘stuck’’ in an ‘‘in-between’’ environment/ status. The more they desire home ownership, the more likely they will invest in the marketplace as laborers or producers. Meanwhile, the more they become successful in that market, the less likely it is that they will leave their adopted cities and live in the urban properties of their own. Keywords Rural migrants Á Homeownership Á Urban village Á Consumption Á Space Á China & Yang Zhan yzhan1@binghamton.edu 1 Anthropology Department, Binghamton University, Binghamton, NY, USA 2 4400 Vestal Parkway East, Binghamton, NY 13902, USA 123 Dialect Anthropol (2015) 39:405–422 DOI 10.1007/s10624-015-9401-6