Housing in China

[2] During the early 1980s, both central and local governments began to gradually explore the marketization of real estate assets in China.

[5] Wade says, "It generally takes at least a decade for China’s new urban developments to start breaking the inertia of stagnation.

The country has shown a major shift in allocating funds and resources to housing their people, building over 5.5 million apartments between the years of 2003 and 2014 in China's cities.

[11] The BBC cites Ordos in Inner Mongolia as the largest ghost town in China, full of empty shopping malls and apartment complexes.

Indicating that the theoretical reasons of a property bubble making it a ghost mall in 2015, may not have even been the determining factor given the only changes were renovations to bring in mass tenants.

According to a report in 2017, the population has increased to 153,000 people living there, 4,750 businesses are now in operation, and housing prices have risen roughly 50% on average from the end of 2015.

[18] Critics argue that the national social-housing programme disproportionally benefits the urban population and that not only can many of the rural poor ill afford new housing in the cities, but they also find it difficult to obtain household-registration certificates (hukou).

[19] According to the former Director of China's Housing & Real Estate Administration Bureau, Professor Lin, as of 2008, Beijing had an average of 1.41 individuals per room across the city.

Rational expectations of a strong future demand for alternative stores of value can thus induce currently productive agents to speculate in the housing market.