China banks told to bail out property developers as mortgage boycotts threaten economy
"Inside China's 'thought transformation' camps - BBC News"
Public protests are unusual in China, but have ramped up across the country recently.
Intervention comes as thousands of homebuyers refuse to make mortgage repayments in deepening property sector crisis
China’s banks have been told to help developers complete unfinished housing projects as thousands of homebuyers refuse to make mortgage instalments on apartments bought off the plan. Photograph: Wu Hong/EPA
Martin Farrer with agencies Mon 18 Jul 2022 15.31 AEST Last modified on Tue 19 Jul 2022 20.19 AEST
Chinese banks have been told to bail out struggling property developers to help them complete unfinished housing projects and head off the growing mortgage strike that threatens to seriously damage the economy.
With thousands of homebuyers banding together to refuse to keep up with mortgage instalments on unfinished apartments bought off the plan, regulators have stepped up efforts to encourage lenders to extend loans to qualified real estate projects.
The China .. https://www.theguardian.com/world/china .. Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission (CBIRC) told the official industry newspaper on Sunday that banks should meet developers’ financing needs where reasonable.
The CBIRC expressed confidence that with concerted efforts, “all the difficulties and problems will be properly solved”, the China Banking and Insurance News reported.
Chinese bank shares still rallied on Monday in wake of the regulator’s intervention and a belief that the government in Beijing will have enough policy measures at its disposal to control the situation.
However, it was not clear whether the banks would be able to absorb the cost of the mortgage strike, which is affecting an estimated 100 projects in 50 cities.
The value of the mortgages involved amounts to 2bn yuan ($300m), according to data from the banks on Friday, but some analysts think the real figure is much higher. GF Securities in Guangdong, for example, said that the amount could be 2tn yuan ($300bn).
As the government’s zero-Covid policy continues to cripple activity .. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/apr/23/china-covid-lockdown-shanghai-economy .. and property sales continue to struggle, analysts at S&P issued a chilling warning on Monday that the writing was now on the wall for property companies facing bond payments totalling $88bn before the end of the year.
“The end of the beginning is at hand for China developer defaults,” S&P said. “In the first stage, firms asked investors to exchange or extend defaulted bonds, to buy some time until the property market recovers. In the next stage, we assume investors will lose patience for such deferrals, especially if home sales do not soon recover.”
If home sales do not pick up sufficiently, S&P said, up to one in five of the rated companies face going bust.
“Based on our sensitivity tests, at least one-fifth of rated Chinese developers could be insolvent. This assumes no refinancing, and that all pre-sold obligations are completed.”
In another note, the rating agency downgraded the Henan province-based developer Central China Real Estate to a B-minus rating as sales fell 55% in the first half of the year and household income also dipped amid the ongoing problems caused by successive Covid lockdowns.
Mark Dong, Hong Kong-based co-founder and general manager of Minority Asset Management, said Beijing had the will to fix the crisis and expected state-owned developers to step in and acquire troubled projects from heavily indebted private peers, accelerating an industry consolidation.
The CBIRC had already vowed last Thursday to strengthen its coordination with other regulators to “guarantee the delivery of homes”.
The rebound in Chinese banking stocks was also aided by news that China will accelerate the issuance of special local government bonds to help supplement the capital of small banks, part of efforts to reduce risks in the sector.
Another regulatory measure included possible tighter rules around the escrow accounts where upfront payments for homes bought off the plan are held. The idea is for that money to be used to complete projects but there is concern that in some cases the funds can be diverted elsewhere by developers to pay off different debts.
The One Million Tibetan Children in China’s Boarding Schools
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Sept. 15, 2023
Matt Rota
By Gyal Lo Dr. Lo is an educational sociologist and a Tibetan activist based in Canada.
One day in late November 2016, back home in Tibet, I received a distressing call from my brother telling me I needed to check on his granddaughters. “Something very strange is happening,” he said.
My young relatives, who were 4 and 5 years old at the time, had just enrolled in a boarding preschool that the Chinese government had established in my hometown, Kanlho, a seminomadic region in the northeast corner of the Tibetan plateau. Their new school was one of many — I have personally tracked about 160 in three Tibetan prefectures alone — and part of Beijing’s growing network of preschools in which Tibetan children are separated from their families and communities and assimilated into Chinese culture.
Though it had only been three months since the girls had started at the school, my brother described how they were already beginning to distance themselves from their Tibetan identity. On weekends, when they could return from school to their family, they rejected the food at home. They became less interested in our Buddhist traditions and spoke Tibetan less frequently. Most alarmingly, they were growing emotionally estranged from our family. “I might lose them if something isn’t done,” my brother worried.
Concerned, I set out to the girls’ school a few days later to pick them up for the weekend. When they walked out of the gates, they waved to me but barely spoke. When we arrived home, the girls didn’t hug their parents. They spoke only Mandarin to each other and remained silent during our family dinner. They had become strangers in their own home.
When I asked the girls about school, the older one recounted how on the first day several children, anxious from being unable to communicate with teachers who only spoke Mandarin, urinated and defecated in their pants.
As the Chinese government continues its 70-year quest to build legitimacy and control over Tibet, it is pivoting increasingly to using education as a battlefield to gain political control. By separating children from their families and familiar surroundings and funneling them into residential schools where they can become assimilated into Chinese subjects, the state is betting on a future where younger generations of Tibetans will become groomed Chinese Communist Party loyalists, model subjects easy to control and manipulate.
After listening to the girls’ stories, I asked my brother what would happen if he just refused to send them. He teared up. Disobeying the new policy would mean having his name blacklisted from government benefits. Others who have protested the new schools have suffered terrible consequences, he said.
He also didn’t have any other choice. Though Chinese boarding schools for Tibetan children have been around since the early 1980s, until fairly recently they had mostly enrolled middle and high school students. But beginning around 2010, the government, in preparation for the new wave of residential preschools, began shutting down local village schools, including the one in our hometown. Then it made preschool a prerequisite for elementary school. Though many of the new boarding schools are far from children's hometowns, refusing to enroll in them would mean children would grow up with little to no education and become further marginalized from an economy that many Tibetans are already excluded from.
Distressed by the changes I observed in my family, I set out over the next few years to visit more than 50 boarding preschools across northern and eastern Tibet, areas that China calls the Qinghai, Sichuan and Gansu provinces. Over the course of my three years of fieldwork and meetings with students, parents and teachers, what I discovered was worse than anything I could have imagined.
I met young Tibetan children who could no longer speak their native tongue. The schools strictly controlled parental visits. In some cases, schoolchildren saw their families only once every six months. Dormitories, playgrounds and teachers’ offices were heavily surveilled. I saw security cameras installed in classrooms, no doubt to make sure teachers — many of whom were young Chinese undergraduates with little to no background in Tibetan language and culture — only used C.C.P.-approved textbooks.
In one school I visited in the nomadic town of Zorge, a homesick child, in a very quiet tone, said: “When it gets dark in the evening and I can’t take care of myself, I miss my mom and grandparents.”
A woman in my village whose small children had been sent to a boarding school told me: “Whenever I came home exhausted after working all day on the farm, I wanted to hug my 4- and 5-year-old kids. But they were not there.” To heal the pain of their separation, she and a group of other young mothers from her village organized a 1,200-kilometer walking pilgrimage to Lhasa.
One villager told me: “We realize that the government is not ours. When officials come to our town, they don’t know our language or how to communicate with us.”
Another asked: “How can our language and culture survive if we are not able to stop what is happening?”
The trend has only accelerated — and reached younger and younger children. In March 2018, at an annual Parliament meeting, President Xi Jinping said that “core socialist values should set the tone of the common spiritual home of all ethnic groups” and “should be nurtured among the people, particularly children and even in kindergartens.”
Beijing’s focus on separating younger Tibetans from their culture has finally caught Washington’s attention. Last month .. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/23/china-forced-assimilation-tibet-us-sanctions-visa , the U.S. secretary of state, Antony Blinken, announced that the United States would impose visa restrictions on Chinese officials who are involved in “the coercion of Tibetan children into government-run boarding schools.” As other countries like Canada and Australia reckon with their own history of colonial boarding schools, I hope they follow in Secretary Blinken’s footsteps and intervene as China enthusiastically replicates these horrors in my homeland.
I can only hope that the international attention will force Beijing to rethink its policy and alter the fates of children like my young relatives. After years of fieldwork, I am deeply concerned for the fate of Tibetan culture: that it will slowly disappear as more and more children are forced to become Chinese, and the Tibetan culture that I know and cherish will not survive for future generations. Or else I worry that they will grow up as perpetual strangers in their own homes, in their own homeland.
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