I'm John Batchel with my good friend and colleague Gordon Chang at Gordon G. Chang, attending to the Chinese property crater.

You have heard that the Chinese real estate market is troubled.

That is an understatement, polite understatement.

There's no expectation whatsoever of recovery.

However, there are headlines that point to hope being the only strategy

that makes sense at this point. And we welcome Anne Stevenson Yang, the author of The Wild Ride,

a book I highly recommend to tell the whole story of the Chinese miracle, which sometimes can

look like a Chinese Ponzi scheme, especially when you look

at real estate. But we do look at real estate now because the headline in CNBC, dutifully,

hopes rise for Chinese property support ahead of Key March meeting. And this point made by the report by Evelyn Chang.

China's Communist Party Journal published a rare article on January 1st, outlining the need

to increase real estate sector support.

And a very good evening to you.

Thank you for this.

What do you make of this idea of hope for the real

estate crater that was developed purposely by the municipal banks and the central banks,

and that makes Japanification look like a success? Good evening to you. Good evening, John. Oh,

it's so boring to have this come up again, and it's so just not going to happen in any possible way.

I'll give you one one interesting thing that I just heard from a friend who was traveling in China and inquiring about a lot of property prices.

And it rings true with what I've heard from my friends there. Officially, property prices have dropped 5.2% in China.

What people say is that they can't sell their property for more than 30% under the

price that they bought it at in the big cities and more like 50 to 60 in the tier two cities.

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