I'm John Datcher, CBSI on the world. Ann Stevenson Yang is here. Her new book is

Wild Ride, a short history of the opening and closing of the Chinese economy. We're at in 2020,

COVID hits. We know the story is shut down of the Chinese economy, seal the apartment buildings in some instances

quite severe, and the Chinese people are rattled. At the same time, there is a financial

crisis that accompanies the shutting down of not just the Chinese economy, but the global

economy. We're still recovering. And all of the bad credit that is now out there cannot be

serviced easily. What is to be done? It's not just the ghost cities because I have this fact

from Ann's reporting. 25% of the GDP that's been reported all these years is based upon

the real estate.

Those projects out there, the miracles, and the miracles have stopped, and deflation sets

in, and also a distrust entirely of authority.

And that's where we are right now looking at this model of recovery.

The expectation, Anne, was that as the U.S. recovered, as Europe recovered from the pandemic,

China would as well. What's holding it back? Why hasn't it recovered?

Well, I think that a lot of people came out of these very, very severe lockdowns quite disappointed in the government because, you know, internationally, people got money while they had to stay home and leave their jobs.

But in China, that didn't happen.

And so they come out of these lockups and they find, well, now I feel very insecure about the future. Is this going to

happen again? And I don't have more money in my pocket. I think I better hold on to what I have

in case something bad happens again. And the response by the central government, Xi Jinping,

was to increase surveillance, was to distrust everybody, was to worry about protests?

There was that moment. I think it was last year, the year before, there was protests in a city

about real estate. So is that what the state does now? It runs from like brush fire to brush

...