This is a series of CVS Island the world. I'm John Basser with my colleague and friend Gordon Chang and we're very pleased to welcome Ann Stevenson Yang, author of the new Wild Ride, a short history of the opening and closing of the Chinese economy. And a good day to you,

the South China Morning Post, given that it's influenced

heavily by Beijing, this headline.

China's home prices fall at a slower pace as Beijing steps into resuscitate property sector.

That sounds vaguely positive given the news of failure.

However, An I witnessed down Wall Street Journal site a young man guiding a tour in what was an abandoned line of mansions looking like a development in Tucson, Arizona, all jammed up against each other,

three or four stories, stone to stone fronts with a community center that looked like a hotel,

except in the hotel, trash all over the floor, and the houses themselves

were not only empty, there were no windows. In other words, there was snow on the ground,

the snow and the rain are coming in, meaning the houses are being

thrown away.

You can't revive a house that had that kind of rot with rain.

Did I see something unusual or is this all over China? This was said to be outside of Shanghai.

Good evening to you. Good evening, John. Yeah, I think this is everywhere. In fact, I once ran a little competition for clients to cite any place in China that didn't have

a ghost city.

And one person nominated Shanghai and I sent pictures of Shanghai.

There was a prize for it which I never managed to award to anybody.

I mean one of the misunderstandings about China is that people think ghost cities are these, you know, isolated developments in the middle of the desert or something like that.

No, they're everywhere. They're in every town and city in China and as for property prices dropping.

Yeah, the problem is the statistics on pricing are just totally unreliable.

So I saw that South China Morning Post article as well.

That was like a 0.35% drop.

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