Wen Tiejun: Real estate has been seriously surplus, why are real estate prices still so high?

Why do we put rural revitalization in such an important position, not only the Chinese civilization we usually talk about, but also the five thousand years of the Chinese nation, and most of the time in the past five thousand years is agricultural civilization, rural civilization, and local civilization, so what is the rejuvenation of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese national civilization? It can't be an urban civilization, because you don't have many urban civilizations in your history, you are mainly a rural civilization, and our main work for five thousand years is agriculture, so what do you say you have a great revival, a revival? Of course, it is a local civilization, how can you destroy the countryside, and then everyone goes to the city, even if you have this desire, but you can't stand the environmental damage and ecological destruction. In today's world, how can one imagine a country of 1.4 billion people becoming an urbanized country? So it's called the old idea, it's not the new idea, but can it be turned around? Can't turn around, the original pattern of interests is there, so how do you break it?

Many people ask me that if the central government orders us to take care of it, I say don't worry, what is the main focus of our urbanization? Real estate, who knows how much real estate is now in excess? According to the normal demand per capita, the area of commercial housing is already twice the normal demand per capita, but why is the house price still high? I said dare not not be high, who let the house price fall, how to repay the bank loan? Behind this bubble of virtual expansion of real estate, there stands an even bigger financial bubble.

I have been working in the financial sector for 10 years, I was originally an independent director of the Agricultural Bank of China and now an independent director of the Postal Savings Bank of China. Recently, the relevant comrades of the financial outlet made an analysis, and more than 50% of household credit and corporate credit were invested in real estate. The central government requires that given the indicator, you must not exceed 1/3, then in fact, how do you pressure him personally, you can only improve, but the improvement has also been loaned back. So if house prices fall, the credit bubble invested in real estate will probably collapse.

And then look back at what? Government debt bubbles. The more developed the region, the more coastal areas, the more serious the debt of local governments, that is to say, behind the development of our developed areas is debt, but this is not surprising, because the United States is developed It is also debt, and we have now become the world's second largest highly indebted country, that is to say, the proportion of comprehensive debt to GDP, the United States is 300, we are about 280, it is difficult to brother.

Well, this debt is largely related to the real estate of the city, why? This is because the cost of our land acquisition is already higher than the income from land transfer. Then everyone asked, in the context of a serious surplus of real estate, why is the price of real estate still so high? Why is it so hard to buy a house? I said it had to be maintained, and if it wasn't maintained, the bubble would collapse. So last year or the year before, there was already a place to start blowing up the building, called "bombing the price of the building", right?

Since the supply is excessive, "bombing the price of the building", in the same way, since the cost of expropriation of land is already higher than the income from your land transfer, why should the local government still expropriate the land? Think about it, what's the point? Our investigation is because your debt is too heavy, you can only get cash to pay the interest on the debt, take the debt interest to pay the old debt, the bank will give you the old debt into a new debt, and you can pay wages. Deteriorated to this point, continue to do it? Supposedly it should stop, right? Who can stop? So although before the Fifth Plenum, General Secretary Xi Jinping has already spoken a paragraph, very bluntly, very objectively, he said that there is an urbanization trend in this world, but there is also a trend of reverse urbanization. If our urbanization is at the expense of rural decay, I think we will have to reverse urbanization. However, it is still good that urbanization and reverse urbanization complement each other. The leader's speech is not leaky, and the discursive logic is very perfect, but in fact, his judgment expressed in this discourse logic is clear, that is, if our urbanization is at the cost of rural decay, I think we have to reverse urbanization. Can it be reversed? With so much debt, so much money pressed on real estate, the Wall Street financial tsunami of the United States in 2008, wasn't the subprime mortgage crisis in 2007 that burst the financial bubble? If we want to stop now, first of all, don't say that we can't stop everywhere, if we really stop, if you really have to stop under an order, then the bubble bursts, and it will be trouble.

You should note that the relevant documents of our first 20 years have described in paragraphs how to promote urbanization, and this 14th Five-Year Plan has only one expression of urbanization. People-centered urbanization no longer has a segmented description. Although before that, because I had been involved in policy research at several important think tanks, a considerable part of our discussions strongly demanded the continuation of urbanization, arguing that the main area for china's already manifested real economy to continue to be maintained was urbanization, because only urbanization could shift the excess manufacturing capacity to production. In other words, let it not explode, what to do? Continue to promote urbanization and absorb more people into the city, which is to develop according to the old pattern. So although this is a considerable part of the policy advice, because in the policy field, there is no right or wrong, good or bad, any kind of policy advice can be mentioned, in the policy advice this is a part. We adhere to the direction of rural revitalization as a priority development, but also a part, in the end the general secretary chose not urbanization, so you see the Fifth Plenary Session of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China on urbanization only one sentence, no longer like before.