Speaker 1: Earlier this year, Chinese media started to report that the
Speaker 1: country's biggest property developer, Country Garden, is in trouble.
Speaker 2: Actually, she's the haughty King.
Speaker 1: Paisangani in the eastern province of Shandan, a thirty five
Speaker 1: year old mother of two starts to freak out. She's
Speaker 1: already paid hundreds of thousands of yuan for a new
Speaker 1: Country Garden apartment. It's supposed to be finished by the
Speaker 1: end of the year.
Speaker 2: It was an an August evening. She scrolled through their
Speaker 2: phone for information all the way till one am.
Speaker 1: Her name is Huilan. She didn't want us to record
Speaker 1: her voice, but she was willing to let Bloomberg's Lulu
Speaker 1: Chen tell her story.
Speaker 2: And then next morning, she drives down to the construction set,
Speaker 2: climbs eighteen floors up to the rooftop of a nearby building,
Speaker 2: and she looks out onto this construction project and she
Speaker 2: sees slabs of cement and ankle high grass, idle prayes,
Speaker 2: and a big muppit.
Speaker 1: It was so far from what she'd imagined for herself
Speaker 1: and for her family.
Speaker 2: Her daughters are asking her when can they move into
Speaker 2: the new apartment, and she doesn't know what to say
Speaker 2: to them.
Speaker 1: How do you explain to a child that China's real
Speaker 1: estate market has crashed. Developers had been in the red
Speaker 1: for a while, but in October, the biggest of them,
Speaker 1: Country Garden, told its bondholders that it could not pay them.
Speaker 1: This is a remarkable reversal. The country's real estate market
Speaker 1: was once valued at more than fifty trillion US dollars.
Speaker 1: It made up a full quarter of China's entire economy,
Speaker 1: and it made millions of people really rich. Now it's
Speaker 1: in tatters. How did this happen? And could it get worse?
Speaker 1: From Bloomberg, I'm Janet Paskin, and this is the big
Speaker 1: take today, How China's property market has crashed, dragging individuals
Speaker 1: right along with it, and what comes next in this
Speaker 1: spiraling crisis. For Huilan, the Shandong mom who went to
Speaker 1: that empty construction site, the new apartment was a big deal,
Speaker 1: partly because it was a chance to give her kids
Speaker 1: a better childhood than she'd had. Here's Lulu again.
Speaker 2: So Huilan grew up in the nineteen nineties. She lived
Speaker 2: in a mutt hut rain wood seep through she get
Speaker 2: frostped in during winter, drank water from a nearby wall.
Speaker 2: And she grew up in this rural area in Shandong
Speaker 2: Province and her only dream was to live in a
Speaker 2: home made of concrete.
Speaker 1: So a mud hut in the nineties, is that a
Speaker 1: was that common at that.
Speaker 2: Time for rural China. That was very common. Also, you
Speaker 2: have to know that this was before China introduced the
Speaker 2: concept of private property. So in the city, most of
Speaker 2: the people lived in dormitories given out by state owned
Speaker 2: companies or government bodies, and in rural regions, building your
Speaker 2: own home was very common.
Speaker 1: But then at the end of the twentieth century, China
Speaker 1: starts to open up and the government lifts its restrictions
Speaker 1: on owning private property.
Speaker 2: This is the first time when the government was able
Speaker 2: to sell land and generate revenue for local bureaucrats. And
Speaker 2: then the developers jumped on the opportunity became a money
Speaker 2: making machine.
Speaker 1: The government's making money, developers business is booming, and for
Speaker 1: the first time, home buyers can join the gold rush too.
Speaker 2: The mentality of property pricing was that it could only
Speaker 2: go up, and it was a sure but a short investment.
Speaker 2: That's why you have families ending up owning seven to
Speaker 2: eight property units per household.
Speaker 1: There's a cultural expectation driving home ownership too. Single people rent,
Speaker 1: married people they own. So when WiLAN got married, she
Speaker 1: and her husband started to look for an apartment and
Speaker 1: it was expensive.
Speaker 2: Absolutely. It took her and her husbands both of their
Speaker 2: parents to help and chip them for the down payment.
Speaker 2: So for many families in China, in order to own property,
Speaker 2: the wealth needs to come from generations.
Speaker 1: Even with the help of their families, Whilan and her
Speaker 1: husband could only afford a starter apartment and it was
Speaker 1: fine for the two of them, but once they had
Speaker 1: the girls, she starts dreaming of something better. Then Country
Speaker 1: Garden comes to town.
Speaker 2: In twenty twenty one. It finally arrives in Wayland's hometown
Speaker 2: and she goes to their sales side. She sees the brochures,
Speaker 2: the three D rendered images, the French windows, and she thinks,
Speaker 2: this feels good. I can finally call this place home.
Speaker 2: And she thinks about how she can move her two
Speaker 2: daughters into separate bedrooms that can have their own space,
Speaker 2: and she puts the down payment in.
Speaker 1: By that point, Country Garden had been around for a while.
Speaker 1: It was founded in nineteen ninety two by a guy
Speaker 1: called yung Qua Quing. He had also grown up extremely poor.
Speaker 2: He likes to tell this story that before the age
Speaker 2: of eighteen, he never owned a pair of shoes, and
Speaker 2: that he would walk for an hour or everyday back
Speaker 2: home for lunch just to save money. And he raised
Speaker 2: cattle when he was growing up as a young person
Speaker 2: in the countryside.
Speaker 1: In the beginning, Country Garden was a plain vanilla construction
Speaker 1: company building apartments for the government. But when China opens
Speaker 1: the door to private property at the end of the nineties,
Speaker 1: Young jumps. He buys land and starts building apartments for
Speaker 1: a whole new generation of buyers. There were other developers too,
Speaker 1: but they were just putting up one building at a time.
Speaker 1: Young and a Country Garden offered something more.
Speaker 2: He would also build these schools, facilities, gyms around the
Speaker 2: housing complex to spice up the value or the lure
Speaker 2: of his residential projects, and he made a name for
Speaker 2: himself in the Guandong area, became somewhat of a local
Speaker 2: entrepreneur hero.
Speaker 1: So at its peak, describe for me how Big Country
Speaker 1: Garden got well.
Speaker 2: At his peak, Country Garden was the nation's largest developer.
Speaker 2: It employed more than one hundred and thirty thousand people
Speaker 2: and constructed more than three thousand projects across the country.
Speaker 2: Sin Huai even interviewed Jankokan at one point and the
Speaker 2: title of the story was the making of a Chinese
Speaker 2: property legend.
Speaker 1: Wow, they are state on media? Do I have that right?
Speaker 2: Suhua is state owned? Couldn't be. You can't get more
Speaker 2: official than su Hua.
Speaker 1: So when they write that story about him, this glowing profile.
Speaker 2: It's an endorsement from the state as well. Yeah, so
Speaker 2: being a property developer, being an entrepreneur was something that
Speaker 2: was celebrated in China in those days.
Speaker 1: Jung is a state sanctioned hero and Country Garden is
Speaker 1: a national brand name. People trust them. That's really important
Speaker 1: because the company's business only works if buyers are willing
Speaker 1: to put big sums of money down for apartments that
Speaker 1: aren't built yet. Country Garden uses that money to pay
Speaker 1: for construction, but also to buy more land so they
Speaker 1: can sell more apartments. The company is doing great. It
Speaker 1: goes public on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in two
Speaker 1: thousand and seven with evaluation around eleven billion US dollars.
Speaker 1: It's the biggest IPO by a Chinese real estate developer.
Speaker 1: This is huge for country Garden and for China. Real
Speaker 1: estate is becoming a critical piece of the economy, and
Speaker 1: both are booming.
Speaker 2: I think at this point the entire system is so
Speaker 2: reliant on real estate that it becomes something that's an
Speaker 2: addiction that's hard to get rid of. At this point, because.
Speaker 1: This bubble, it starts to build on itself, and prices
Speaker 1: only go up as long as they go.
Speaker 2: Up exactly never sustainable.
Speaker 1: Nothing goes up forever. After the break. When the bubble
Speaker 1: bursts in the twenty tens, the Chinese government starts to
Speaker 1: worry that there's a real estate bubble forming. It doesn't
Speaker 1: want to pop it, but it also doesn't want it
Speaker 1: to get bigger.
Speaker 2: So the goal was always to make sure that the
Speaker 2: bubble kept going, but not so big that when it
Speaker 2: popped it would create tears and pain. So the government
Speaker 2: starts introducing property curbs, measures that limit the buying capabilities
Speaker 2: of individuals and households. And this is the period where
Speaker 2: interesting stuff like fake marriages, fake divorces start popping up
Speaker 2: up for families to buy more property.
Speaker 1: Eventually, President sheejin Ping starts to say very plainly, houses
Speaker 1: are for living in, not for speculating on funds to that,
Speaker 1: but no one listens. Buyers are still piling into the
Speaker 1: property market, and developers just keep building and borrowing. Then
Speaker 1: it's twenty twenty, the pandemic hits and the tide starts
Speaker 1: to turn. Banks pull back on lending, and smaller developers
Speaker 1: start to run into trouble. Then one of Country gardens
Speaker 1: main competitors, Evergrand defaults.
Speaker 2: So when they default, it has this rippling effect across
Speaker 2: the financial markets first, and then the offshore bond market
Speaker 2: also dries up because global investors are really worried that
Speaker 2: their money will never get paid back. So the developers
Speaker 2: are in a really challenging place at this point because
Speaker 2: they have no financing.
Speaker 1: This isn't good for Country Garden either, but it wasn't
Speaker 1: in trouble yet. It had a national reputation, it was
Speaker 1: a name brand and enough money to keep expanding into
Speaker 1: China's smaller cities. And then people stop buying.
Speaker 2: COVID happened, so people couldn't travel, and at this point
Speaker 2: a lot of families already owned multiple properties, so it
Speaker 2: no longer made sense for them to keep piling into
Speaker 2: the sector this type of assets unless they were sure
Speaker 2: that the prices would still double or generate the same
Speaker 2: amount of returns like in the old years. And this
Speaker 2: fact that Czinping has signaled that housing is not for speculating,
Speaker 2: it also dampens that sentiment. So the chain reaction causes
Speaker 2: people to hold back on buying.
Speaker 1: When that happens, the developers lose their last source of funds.
Speaker 1: By August, Country Gardens starts to miss payments and reports
Speaker 1: that they're in trouble are starting to surface in the media.
Speaker 1: And this is when Wylin and thousands of other people
Speaker 1: start posting on social media and they are furious at
Speaker 1: the developers.
Speaker 2: And they'll post the latest photos and videos of their
Speaker 2: unfinished homes on doing every day. And we've talked to
Speaker 2: people who've said that their parents have cancer, they have
Speaker 2: medical bills to pay, they have kids to feed, and
Speaker 2: they've lost their jobs and their homes are not being completed,
Speaker 2: but they're still putting in the mortgages. And then there's
Speaker 2: also people who got laid off by Country Garden, by
Speaker 2: all the developers, and there's construction workers who have yet
Speaker 2: to be paid as well.
Speaker 1: Loul, what's the government going to do?
Speaker 2: As of November, the government has come up with a
Speaker 2: fifty developer white list. We've been told by sources the
Speaker 2: list is expected to include a variety of state back
Speaker 2: firms but also private firms, and once they get on
Speaker 2: that list, they will be eligible for financial support. I
Speaker 2: think even though getting on this list would help, it
Speaker 2: doesn't guarantee their survival. But if they don't get on
Speaker 2: this list, then these companies will definitely be in trouble.
Speaker 1: So here are fifty companies that could make it, and
Speaker 1: everybody else is pretty much out of luck.
Speaker 2: That's right.
Speaker 1: What the government does or doesn't do next will be
Speaker 1: a big deal. Financial firms lent to developers and to
Speaker 1: home buyers. Now they're exposed.
Speaker 2: So people are just waiting at this point.
Speaker 1: Because against this backdrop, the broader economy has slowed. We're
Speaker 1: still coming out of COVID, interest rates are arising. It's
Speaker 1: not a great time for housing markets carryuid, and the
Speaker 1: implications go beyond housing because property isn't just a big
Speaker 1: part of GDP, it's a major component of personal wealth.
Speaker 1: Home values make up about eighty percent of average household
Speaker 1: wealth in China. When prices fall, people feel poorer and
Speaker 1: they spend less. Another hit to the economy.
Speaker 2: Exactly, and then that in itself, the dropping of household
Speaker 2: assets because of the plunge and property values is in
Speaker 2: itself also affecting the other driver that the government I
Speaker 2: was hoping to count on, which is consumption.
Speaker 1: And we talked about how real estate became this major
Speaker 1: engine of economic growth, does that change and if it does,
Speaker 1: is there anything for China that takes its place.
Speaker 2: Well, China is in a crucial transition moment because real
Speaker 2: estate is not working. X force are slumping and it's
Speaker 2: still trying to find the next anchor for growth. And
Speaker 2: consumption would have been one of those anchors, but we've
Speaker 2: talked about why that's not working right now.
Speaker 1: The government has told Country Garden in no uncertain terms,
Speaker 1: to deliver the apartments they've promised or else, but that
Speaker 1: won't be easy. They have more than three thousand projects
Speaker 1: in development and no easy source of funding. That means
Speaker 1: for people like Wylan, it could be a very long
Speaker 1: wait and maybe never. She told us that seeing the
Speaker 1: construction site, that was when it really started to sink in.
Speaker 2: That was the moment before that she always thought maybe
Speaker 2: they would delay the delivery of the project, but that
Speaker 2: was the moment where she thought, maybe my home will
Speaker 2: never be built.
Speaker 1: That's it for today's show. This episode was produced by
Speaker 1: Young Young. The reporters for this story are Emma Dong
Speaker 1: Jungle and John Leu. We had help from Donsau Selena
Speaker 1: Schu and provi Our editors are Emma O'Brien and Caitlin Kenney.
Speaker 1: Blake Maples is our sound engineer, and Sage Bauman is
Speaker 1: Bloomberg's head of podcast