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Building things and breaking things in China (Summer School World Tour)
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The Top of the Market: Three Private Jets and a Card Game
At 13:13 · chapter starts 12:00
If there was a single image that captured the apex of China's real estate boom, it was this: three private jets flying to France, two of them empty, while a group of the country's richest property developers played cards in the third. The card game's name — 'Struggle Against the Landlord' — is a delicious irony that Emily Feng cannot hide her amusement at. [1] — Desmond Shum "Three private jets flew to France — two of them empty — so real estate moguls could play cards. Meanwhile $10,000 watches were handed out a…" 07:37 The scene involves Evergrande founder Xu Jiayin (who Desmond says once offered to buy Whitney a million-dollar ring), several other billionaires, and a wine club trip to France that became a symbol of spectacular, unreflective excess. Nick Fountain provides the economic context: China had gone from essentially prohibiting private property to 90% home ownership in just a couple of decades, generating seemingly limitless demand and skyrocketing prices. This is the economy working exactly as the engineering state intended — until it doesn't.
Over just a couple of decades, China went from not allowing private property ownership to 90% of people owning their own homes.
Buried deep in Xi Jinping's 2017 Party Congress speech was one sentence: houses are for living in, not speculating. That single line kicked off years of tightening regulation that eventually brought Evergrande — carrying hundreds of billions in debt — to its knees.
