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...real estate mogul. But when the government asked him to move out of his central Shanghai home so that the land it was on could be sold for redevelopment, he took the compensation payment and bought an apartment on Shanghai's outskirts. Eight years later, after cleverly parlaying that first asset, the cabbie owns three apartments in the city and has his eyes on something bigger: a lovely five-bedroom, riverfront suburban house, owned but never occupied by a coal magnate from Shanxi province. "How much does he want for it?" he asked a local real estate agent in late...
...asset investment accounted for more than 90% of China's overall growth; residential and commercial real estate investment comprised nearly a quarter of that. Toss in the not insignificant fact that it was a huge real estate bust in the U.S. that dumped the world into recession in the first place, and many analysts are now beginning to fear the worst. "China's property market," says independent Shanghai economist Andy Xie, "is a massive bubble." (See TIME's photo-essay "The Making of Modern China...
...incurred by local governments forging headlong into massive infrastructural and development projects. Even as it was being distributed, Premier Wen Jiabao was telling NPC delegates that the authorities would slow both lending and new construction in 2010, and place additional curbs on speculative property investment. A mortgage discount for first-time property buyers - which made a fixed, 5% 20-year mortgage available for just above 4% - has already been eliminated, and lending standards for buyers looking at second and third properties as investments have been tightened appreciably...
...burst, recent history has shown, they tend to do so with a bang. Is China, in fact, now at the end of its real estate boom? Many are not convinced. They point to a couple of factors that make China's situation different from that of the U.S. The first is that the real estate sector is nowhere near as reliant on debt financing as it is in the U.S. and much of the rest of the developed world. Consider the complex in which Yang, the cabbie, bought one of his three Shanghai apartments. The developer, Shanghai Forte Land, presold...
...China's Megatrends is the latest addition to John Naisbitt's Megatrends franchise, a series of middlebrow works that offer extremely generalized social and economic predictions. The first Megatrends (1982) was a publishing phenomenon that sold over 9 million copies and spent two years on the New York Times best-seller list. It was followed by Megatrends 2000 (1990), Megatrends for Women (1992) and Megatrends Asia (1996). But although almost 30 researchers worked on China's Megatrends, it has all the hallmarks of a glib, bolt-on extension to the juggernaut. It is breathtaking in its simplistic, groveling...