Shares in crisis-hit Chinese property giant Evergrande have been suspended in Hong Kong amid reports its chairman has been placed under police surveillance.
It follows reports earlier this week that other current and former executives had also been detained.
Thursday’s market statement did not give a reason for the trading halt.
But it marks another low for the heavily indebted property giant which defaulted in 2021, triggering China’s current real estate market crisis.
In August, the firm filed for bankruptcy in New York, in a bid to protect its US assets as it worked on a multi-billion dollar deal with creditors.
I definitely can applaud their government for potentially holding them accountable. However they’re not arrested yet, and more importantly it’s not like this was a secret or fraud per se. We’ve been hearing about China’s “ghost cities” for a number of years now. Buildings built without people in them, buildings half built or only the shell to look complete, and that’s through media that’s allowed to escape their walled garden of information. To me there’s no way that even Xi himself didn’t know that Evergande or Country Garden wasn’t out defrauding the average Chinese citizen. So while good on them for putting them under surveillance today, it’s also terrible of them to have let this gone on.
I’m also an American though so my information may be limited on this subject matter since I’m not a focused person on one country or field.
The problem with using ghost cities as a metric is that China has a lot of pent up demand to urbanize and those cities would get filled within a few years. That pent up demand is what led to a generation of growth.
However, the plan works until it doesn’t.
China seems to have hit a limit on growth and that limit seems correlated to population growth instead of COVID. Worse, housing investment is a key way that people save for retirement. Even worse, municipalities and provinces can’t raise their own taxes, so they’ve been incentivized to keep building even as the national government has been trying to put the breaks on the economy.
There might have been some criminal malfeasance, but there is also a failure of public policy from the national level down. Part of it may be why Xi has become more autocratic in the past few years; the party is going through its first recession in a generation and this is new ground for them.
Well, a significant part of this can be resolved nicely by creating a comprehensive welfare system. Just off the top of my head - buy out the apartments purchased as investment and provide good pensions in their place. Then people won’t feel the need to participate in this failing market and won’t be affected of its potential collapse. I’ve been wondering why there’s no proper welfare system in China and I recently stumbled upon info that Xi believes welfare makes people lazy. So that’s a problem. If I were a Chinese citizen whose bought into the social contract with the CCP, I’d expect the construction of a good welfare system out of it.