Recent statistics from China’s central bank show that home buyers’ enthusiasm has fallen drastically. Despite price cuts and incentives, the world’s largest housing market continues to slump, and China’s banking sector is taking a hit on two fronts, as both defaults and prepayments rise. Meanwhile, China’s developers are starting to show the strain, with real…

Chinese property companies that survived the debt peak in 2022 may not be able to get through 2023. Meanwhile, although a research institute says that China’s housing companies have “seen the dawn,” most private real-estate companies still fail to issue bonds. On Feb. 7, Guangzhou Times Holding Group Co. Ltd. announced that it would suspend…

Analysis Looking back at 2022, China’s economy increasingly struggled under various policies of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). From the extreme “zero-Covid” policy to the regulations in the real estate sector, and from the waves of defaulted loans on incomplete buildings to the deterioration of exports, China’s economy has been hit hard, and many policies…

Yang Huiyan, the richest woman in China, recently sold about 7 per cent of her stake in Country Garden Services Holdings, cashing out about HK$5.055 billion (approx. $660 million). The share price fell nearly 16 percent the next day. The “2022 Hurun Women Entrepreneurs List,” released on Dec. 12, ranked Yang as China’s richest woman…

Amid China’s sinking real estate market, a number of industry tycoons were dropped from this year’s Hurun 100 Richest People List, released on Nov. 8. Among them, the wealth of Evergrande’s Xu Jiayin shrank sharply to 30 billion yuan (about $4.22 billion), putting him in 172nd place on the list. The wealth of Yang Huiyan…

Real estate sales have plunged by more than 20 percent across major cities in China, despite Beijing’s efforts to shore up its struggling housing market. Authorities have tried rolling out stimulus policies, such as tax breaks for new home buyers and lower mortgage rates but the overall performance of the real estate market remains poor…

Commentary A few months ago, I wrote that the Chinese slowdown was much more than COVID-19 related and pointed to the challenges coming from the excessive weight of the real estate sector in the economy. A research paper by Kenneth Rogoff and Yuanchen Yang (pdf) estimated that the real estate sector constitutes 29 percent of…

China plans to collect up to 300 billion yuan (about $44.4 billion) to support real estate developers struggling to finish their projects, while over half a million buyers stopped mortgage payments on their unfinished homes in July. The fund is collected by China’s State Council, financial information platform REDD reported on July 26. The China Construction…

Commentary The most recent macroeconomic figures show that the Chinese slowdown is much more severe than expected and not only attributable to the COVID-19 lockdowns. The lockdowns have an enormous impact. Twenty-six of China’s 31 mainland provinces have rising coronavirus cases, and the fear of a Shanghai-style lockdown is enormous. The information coming from Shanghai…

China property shares rose dramatically after China proposed countermeasures to prevent risks in the debt-ridden real estate sector at the latest financial stability meeting. The scale of capital invested in the stock market was an extraordinary sign, Chinese media said. According to Chinese financial media Times Weekly on March 18, it seems that a financial…