If the leaks and rumors are true, Beijing stands ready to launch a new and radical solution to the economy’s property crisis – a government takeover. What the authorities refer to as “a new model” would replace the old emphasis on ownership with more rentals and use government funds to buy up bankrupt properties so that in time the government’s role in real estate would rise from 5% of the market at present to 30%. Such an act would surely take the nation back to its communist roots if not quite the days of Mao Zedong. If it would veil the property crisis for a time, it would in the long run do tremendous damage to China’s economic prospects.
Since US prices are so high, they were salivating at a Chinese housing crisis. That way they could enter the Chinese market and buy up properties for cheap. But since the government is going to buy up the cheap homes, they can’t enter the market. So now comes the propaganda tantrum about how there’s no way this will work, it’s evil, it’s authoritarian.
Problem is that shit only works on Americans. Appealing to Chinese people’s sens of individualistic English property rights doesn’t really work.
So they funded housing development until there were plenty of houses at which point they stopped funding more development and this is bad for some reason? What did they want them to do, continue encouraging development when there wasn’t a need for it solely to prop up the investors?
If they had done that, then we could get more of the stories about the ghost cities that are the harbinger of China’s imminent collapse. I’ve been reading those articles for decades. They’ve kept a lot of journalists busy.
Unironically yes. Liberalism is crazy
Well, they are leaving out how demand fell off a cliff after Beijing locked everyone in their high rise apartments for a year or more.
Imagine the government listening to the science and using public health measures to save millions of lives instead of demanding everybody go die so the quarterly profits aren’t interrupted.