CHINA UNDERGOES $500B MAKEOVER
Beijing speeds up construction of homes to boost slowing economy
China has turned half a trillion dollars of central bank money into bricks and mortar, and there’s more to come.
That transformation can be best seen in Heze, a “small” city of about nine million in the province of Shandong. There, local authorities have ripped down more than a quarter of a million older houses since 2015, some of them traditional-style homes with calligraphy emblazoned above wooden doors, in order to build new ones financed largely by money printed by the People’s Bank of China.
As part of its efforts to support a slowing economy, the government said this week that it is speeding up the construction of 15 million new homes to replace substandard dwellings nationwide. That program has so far pumped 3.2 trillion yuan (US$463 billion) into the economy, by replacing older buildings with shiny new tower blocks.
With Donald Trump’s trade war battering the economic outlook, the government is pulling multiple levers to lessen the impact on Chinese citizens, as well as softening previous campaigns to reduce debt risk and clean up the financial sector. Now, by accelerating the so-called shanty-town redevelopment program while curbing the cash handouts that have accompanied it, Beijing is trying to boost stimulus while avoiding a bursting of property bubbles nationwide.
“Shanty-town redevelopment is important as this is a key part of domestic demand which is directly controlled by the government,” analysts led by Song Yu, chief China economist at Beijing Gao Hua Securities Co., Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s mainland jointventure partner, wrote in a note.
“There have been a lot of market concerns whether the government would scale back the amount of related investment.”
It’s hard to over-estimate the transforming power of the program, at least in the places where it has been implemented. It works by using newly created PBOC yuan to give occupants of old communal housing brand-new apartments, cash, or both.
The PBOC prints money, lends it to the China Development Bank, the world’s biggest policy bank, via the Pledged Supplementary Lending Facility, which then lends to local government financing vehicles in mostly small cities. Local governments aim to repay the loans via revenue from land sales or redevelopment.
Heze has demolished more older homes than any other small city in China. One of the city’s few other claims to fame is that it is the hometown of Peng Liyuan, President Xi Jinping ’s wife and China’s first lady. There, towers are still rising from the dusty streets and construction is in full swing.
Li Ai’lian is among those who received windfall gains. Last year she was compensated for her old self-built home with three apartments and 300,000 yuan in cash.
“This saved me 10 years of hard work,” says Li. “Where we lived before there were muddy roads outside with chickens and ducks running around. It was so dirty.”
While the program has improved the lives of thousands of people like Li and helped boost consumption and growth, it’s also fuelled a buildup of debt in many small cities with weak finances. In Heze, downtown house prices have more than doubled to 8,000 yuan per square metre within about four years, according to Fan Guifang, a saleswoman at property agent Hua Yang Fang Chan in the city.
Managing home prices is not an abstract matter for Xi Jinping’s government; it’s a matter of social stability. Home buyers angry that apartments are being sold for much less than they paid swamped property developers’ offices across China over the Golden Week holiday, demanding their money back.
China economist Lu Ting at Nomura International Ltd. in Hong Kong likens the cash settlement part of the plan to “helicopter money,” a term coined by Milton Friedman to explain how central banks could drop newly printed money from a helicopter to boost prices.
China plans to construct 15 million homes under the program over three years from January this year with work already underway on 5.34 million units. Yu at Beijing Gao Hua says the government has left room “for a potential tweak higher in the target next year.”
Heze’s forging ahead. When Nissan car salesman Cao Zhihui was posted there a year ago, it looked like it was being reconstructed after an earthquake, he said. All across the city older neighbourhoods of traditional housing were flattened or being demolished while in other parts brand new apartment blocks and other infrastructure were under construction.
Heze plans to demolish another 127,000 houses this year and 122,000 more by 2020, says its local government. It received loans under the program totalling 36 billion yuan in the past two years, almost matching its fiscal revenue of 37.1 billion yuan.
Xu Li, 33, is one of the beneficiaries. Her family received two three-bedroom apartments about a year ago in return for an old house. Though she says half of her high-school friends have left Heze for cities with better opportunities, she beams with happiness.
“Getting a house is one of life’s most difficult things,” she said, while playing with her one-yearold daughter in her new apartment complex’s play area. “In one swoop all of life’s major challenges have been solved.”