Word: marketizing
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...Another critical factor underpinning the residential real estate market is formed by the psychology of the Chinese home buyer in combination with regulatory restraints on what they can do with their savings. Just 34 years out of the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, and less than 15 years down the road from a nasty bout of inflation - consumer prices rose a staggering 21% in 1994 - the Chinese regard real estate as vital security (what Tsinghua's Chovanec calls the "bar of gold" syndrome). Yang says he hasn't even tried to rent out two of his three apartments because...
...eggs to work. Bank interest rates remain regulated and miserly - offering less than 1% return on a standard savings account - and China has only just begun to open the door to its citizens being able to invest legally abroad. For most savers, that leaves real estate or the stock market - and if an apartment is the equivalent of a bar of gold, the stock market is the equivalent of a casino. Generally speaking, the Chinese love to gamble, but they love their bars of gold more. (Read "Five Things the U.S. Can Learn from China...
...None of this means, of course, that the market is safe. Indeed, people caught up in a bubble typically offer seemingly solid reasons as to why the bubble won't burst. In Tokyo in the early 1990s, it was said that property prices wouldn't crash because in mountainous Japan there was so little usable land relative to size of the population. That was, and remains, a topographical fact. It was also, eventually, irrelevant...
...Tiger Re "Tale of the Cat" [March 1]: During a visit to a Shanghai animal market in 1999, I observed a man sitting at the kerb cutting small pieces from a tiger's paw, mixing them with different herbs and then making small parcels of the mixture and selling them. While I was watching, two policemen turned up and also found interest in his business. One of them even bought a packet! Obviously they had not heard about the law banning trade in tiger parts. Unfortunately, as long as greed, poverty, corruption and old culture exist, there is very little...
...timing that the glowing, indeed craven, China's Megatrends appears just as the world is rethinking China's rise. Google's threat to pull out of China, friction over the Dalai Lama, problematic international access to China's domestic market, the country's flawed regulatory environment, its voracious hunger for resources, its geopolitical maneuvers in Africa and Asia: all have lent urgency to worries about the country's ascendancy. But not for John and Doris Naisbitt. To them, China is an unalloyed success, one whose virtues are too little understood. Take Internet censorship: "Actually, most of the concerns about...