Category: ‘falling

  • China’s home prices have continued to drop, extending the decline in January as newly-built and second-hand property prices slid further, according to data from the country’s statistics bureau.

    Prices of new homes declined by 0.5% in January from a year ago, the drop wider in major cities like Beijing and Shanghai compared to second- and third-tier places. Those for the secondary market widened 1.4 percentage points to a 4.9% decrease in first-tier cities, said the National Statistics Bureau on Friday. 

    The freefall in prices added to the suffering of millions of homeowners who are burdened with mortgages and the pressure of monthly payments as the economy stutters. If the properties were bought at a high price which since has plunged beyond the purchase level, monthly payments would be more painful. 

    “The price of this house now is so low to the extent that the entire down payment [amount] has been written off,” lamented a YouTube travel blogger with nearly 300,000 followers called Bacon, in a video at the end of last year. 

    Bacon complained that he bought an apartment in northern Chinese province of Shaanxi’s Xixian New District at a price of 11,000 yuan (US$1,528) per square meter in 2019. The price shot up to 16,000 yuan at one point post COVID-19 epidemic, but has since fallen to less than 10,000 yuan.

    The high interest rate, however, added insult to injury for his family, and they opted to pay back some of the principal borrowed.

    “It has been four years, and we have repaid 31,000 yuan of the principal but the interest paid is over 200,000 yuan. Fortunately, the bank has lowered the interest rate. When we took  the loan, it was 5.6%, and now it is down to 4.2%.”

    The district is a national-level grade development area, Bacon said. Yet, foreclosed apartments are common and more than 100 units are up for sale. Many were advertised with urgency: “the landlord is in a hurry to sell; price drops and bank to cut off loan.”

    “In hindsight … [the area] was just for land speculation and selling properties. There is really nothing here except high prices.”

    Further south, in southwestern Chongqing city, an aggrieved homeowner who goes by Chen Yi, took to social media to complain that the value of the 1 million yuan apartment he paid for in 2021 has dropped by 300,000 yuan, but he still has to pay more than 3,000 yuan in monthly mortgage.

    “It’s like you only have 5 yuan, but you have to spend 10 yuan a month,” he told Radio Free Asia, adding that he regretted the purchase “because the price dropped after I bought it.”

    Freefalling prices

    According to the “100 Cities Price Index Report” by the real estate market analysis firm Zhongzhi Research Institute, the average price of second-hand residential properties in 100 key Chinese cities in January fell to 15,230 yuan per square meter, a near 4% drop from a year ago.

    In the newly built housing segment, prices have fluctuated in more than two years since Nov. 2021.

    Another regretful homeowner is a 40-year-old who goes by Wu Qiming. Wu said purchased his property, egged on by his family who held the traditional concept that “only when you own a home, you have laid your foundation.” So Wu took out a loan of more than 500,000 yuan in 2015 to buy a place in a third-tier inland city in a northern coastal province.

    Then the pandemic hit.

    “In the three years that the Wuhan Coronavirus pandemic raged on, my family’s income was almost zero. I didn’t repay the loan for about seven months and was sued by the bank.”

    Following numerous rounds of  negotiations, his property was spared from being auctioned off. The judge told him that there were too many foreclosures in their city, and even if Wu’s property was auctioned, it was unlikely to be sold within three years.

    Foreclosure auctions in China have been on the rise since 2020, hitting a record of 796,000 units in 2023, an increase of 36.7% over the previous year, according to data from the China Index Academy. About half are residential properties, a clear indication of the economic brunt bore by mortgage borrowers.

    Although Wu’s apartment escaped foreclosure, it was expropriated by the government in 2022 to be demolished and rebuilt. But it was a “turning point” because the authorities not only promised to provide him with a relocation house, but also paid a compensation fee to make up for the difference in floor space. The fee was enough to pay off the mortgage, he said.

    However, the path remains bumpy, as the local government has no money to build the relocation homes. While the rental for his temporary home is paid by the government, he’s not sure when authorities will pull the plug.

    When asked if he would ever purchase a property again, Wu’s answer was a definitive no. 

    “I will never buy another house, no matter how cheap it is.”

    No confidence

    Eroding investor confidence in the property market doesn’t bode well for the sector which in turn affects broader economic growth, where the real estate industry has been a major driver. The rapid demise of the property market began when the biggest developers like Evergrande and Country Garden sparked off a series of defaults after years of overleveraged and bad investments, weighing on the banking system. It has also piled on debts for local authorities which relied on land sales to fund infrastructure development and governmental operations.

    ENG_CHN_Prop_02232024_2.JPG
    A view of an unfinished residential compound developed by China Evergrande Group in the outskirts of Shijiazhuang, Hebei province, China, Feb. 1, 2024. (Tingshu Wang/Reuters)

    In an apparent stop-gap measure, Beijing is pushing banks to support its “white list” of approved projects. As of Feb. 20, 162 projects across 57 cities have been granted a total of 29.4 billion yuan in loans, compared to 11.3 billion yuan before the Lunar New Year holidays, China’s official Xinhua news agency reported, citing the state-owned Economic Daily.

    Some 1,292 real estate companies filed for bankruptcy between 2020 and 2023, according to China Real Estate Network. Hong Kong-listed Evergrande, once the poster developer, was ordered by a Hong Kong court to liquidate earlier this year after failing to pay 2.5 trillion yuan in debt. Chinese state media reported that it has as many as 1.62 million units of “unfinished properties”, affecting 6 million owners.

    The property sector’s boom to bust path can be attributed to the government’s control measures, marked by a tightening of loans in 2017 and 2018, which heeded Chinese President Xi Jinping’s policy that “homes are for living, not speculating” introduced in 2016, a time when prices were at a high level, pointed out Liu Jinxing, a 17-year industry specialist who now lives in the United States. 

    “The real estate industry is a capital-intensive industry. Once there is a loan shortage, like some places restricting purchases and mortgage loans, and more importantly, recalling real estate development loans while limiting lending, it will sharply reduce developers’ capital liquidity.”

    This means real estate companies can only rely on home sales income to pay off their credit and liabilities, which is stressful. The COVID-19 pandemic worsened their plight.

    Zou Tao, a real estate investment expert who in 2006 advocated the movement of not buying a house in Shenzhen, believes that many local governments, because of the intricate ties to the property sector, are effectively insolvent.

    Land sales are a fast and non-costly way for these local officials to score economic achievement and political equity, which leads to promotions.

    “But this development model is actually very harmful, and has led to today’s situation with many unfinished buildings.”

    ENG_CHN_Prop_02232024_3.jpg
    A Chinese government propaganda billboard with the words China Dream is erected in front of a property construction site in Beijing, China. The nation’s real estate sector is in a crisis that authorities are struggling to fix. (Andy Wong/AP)


    Bottomed out prices?

    A real estate industry professional in Shanghai who goes by Liu Yu doesn’t think so.

    Although prices have fallen by 13% to 20% since last year, compared with 2021’s peak level, demand hasn’t increased as the number of consumer groups viewing properties went from between eight to 10 a month, to three to four.  

    Large-scale layoffs in Shanghai and a tanking stock market add to the property slump, Liu said, adding that it didn’t mean Shanghainese “don’t have money, but they don’t dare make the move.”

    Zou pointed out that there’s a shift in how Chinese people view a property – value as an asset during the past 20 years of property boom no longer applies. In the future, when properties are seen less as additional investment and financial tools, and more for self use, prices will slowly recover. “It will take at least five years for [house prices] to slowly recover,” Zou said.

    However, Wu Jialong, an economist based in Taipei, believes that five to 10 years is not enough, taking a leaf from the Japanese experience, and thus projecting at least 20 or even 30 years for China to get out of the current gloom.

    Wu said China has fallen into debt-type deflation as companies and individuals are under pressure to repay debts, so they have to sell off assets. 

    “The more the selling, the lower the asset prices. The lower they fall, the less cash can be mobilized by selling assets. So we had to sell more assets, [entering] this vicious cycle.”

    Even after more than 20 years, he said the Japanese economy has not yet fully recovered.

    Translated by RFA staff. Edited by Taejun Kang and Mike Firn.


    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Stacy Hsu for RFA Mandarin and RFA Staff.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.


  • This content originally appeared on VICE News and was authored by VICE News.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Sign of radiation hotspot in Kashiwa, Japan 2022.

    Radiation hotspot in Kashiwa, Japan 2022.

    Japan’s breathtaking earthquake and tsunami waves of March 11, 2011— which first smashed the Fukushima Daiichi reactors’ foundations and the electrical grid, and then destroyed all its back-up power generators — led to a “station blackout” and the meltdown of three large reactors and to hydrogen explosion that blew apart four reactor containment structures.

    Before the disaster, Tokyo Electric Power Co. (Tepco) had refused to sufficiently upgrade its protective sea wall, although it had been warned of the risk of extreme tsunamis. The site was hit by a tsunami of a height of 46 feet, but Tepco had prepared for a wave of up to only 18 feet.  (Fukushima Meltdown: The World’s First Earthquake-Tsunami-Nuclear Disaster, Takashi Hirose, p. 30) The result was a catastrophic, unprecedented simultaneous triple reactor meltdown: an earthquake-tsunami-radiation event that had never before been seen on Earth.

    Tepco’s cost-avoidance on its sea wall was only the first in a string of failures that have followed like dominos. The corruption led in July 2022 to convictions of four top Tepco executives for negligence and a fine of $95 billion.

    In the 12 years since the meltdowns, Tepco’s disaster response efforts, always heralded as fixes, have been a series of hugely expensive failures: the “advanced” wastewater filter system “ALPS” has failed; the buried “ice wall” groundwater barrier has failed; containers made for the radioactive sludge produced by ALPS have failed; and plans to deal with millions of tons of collected debris — now kept in plastic bags — are being fiercely resisted by Japanese citizens.

    Tons of cooling water is still being poured every day into Fukushima’s triple reactor wrecks to keep the hot melted fuel from again running amok. Additionally, groundwater gushes through the reactors’ foundations’ countless cracks and breaks caused by the staggering earthquake into what’s left of the structures’ sub-floors. All this water becomes highly radioactive as it passes over and through three giant masses — totaling at least 880 tonnes — of melted and mangled uranium and plutonium fuel.

    You read that right. Fukushima’s destroyed reactor No. 3 was using fuel made partly of plutonium (see below), and so plutonium contaminates not just the ground and cooling water running over the melted fuel, but the ALPS apparatus, its filters, the containers used to store the radioactive sludge extracted by ALPS, and of course the sludge itself. You would think that the word plutonium would appear occasionally in news coverage of this ongoing disaster.

    Failed ALPS means million-tonne do-over 

    Tepco’s jerry-rigged system dubbed Advanced Liquid Processing System or ALPS has never worked as planned. As early as 2013 the machinery was stalled. “The ALPS system failed to reduce radioactive elements, as claimed by the owner,” Power Technology, reported June 2, 2021.

    Tepco has repeatedly said ALPS would remove 62 radioactive materials — all but tritium and carbon-14 from the continuously expanding volume of wastewater. Documents on a government committee’s website show that of 890,000 tonnes of water held at Fukushima, 750,000 tonnes, or 84 percent, contain higher concentrations of radioactive materials than legal limits allow, according to Reuters, Oct. 11, 2018. Among the long-lasting and deadly isotopes picked up by the water runs that through melted fuel wreckage are cesium, strontium, cobalt, ruthenium, carbon-14, tritium, iodine, plutonium, and at least 54 others.

    In a June 14 op/ed for the China Daily, Shaun Burnie, the Senior Nuclear Specialist at Greenpeace East Asia, reported that the ALPS “has been a spectacular failure” and noted that:

    “About 70 percent or 931,600 cubic meters of the wastewater needs to be processed again (and probably many more times) by the ALPS to bring the radioactive concentration levels below the regulatory limit for discharge. Tepco has succeeded in reducing the concentration levels of strontium, iodine, and plutonium in only 0.2 percent of the total volume of the wastewater, and it still requires further processing. But no secondary processing has taken place in the past nearly three years. Neither Tepco nor the Japanese government [have] said how many times the wastewater needs to be processed, how long it will take to do so, or whether the efforts will ever be successful. Greenpeace reported on these problems and why the ALPS failed nearly five years ago, and none of these issues has been resolved.”

    Consequently, Tepco says it will re-filter over 70 percent of the 1.37 million tonnes of wastewater stored in giant tanks on site. Approximately 875,000 tons of contaminated water must be put through the system again, a process that will leave behind more of the highly radioactive and corrosive waste sludge.

    Hoping to slow the rush to dumping, Ryota Koyama, a professor at Fukushima Univ. in Japan, said in an interview with China Media Group last May, “If the Japanese government or the Tokyo Elec Power Co really wants to discharge contaminated water into the sea, they need to explain in more detail whether the nuclides have really been removed.”

    Ice wall also melts

    Tepco intended to reduce the volume of groundwater gushing into the reactor building foundations by digging a $350 million “ice wall” into the earth between the destroyed reactors and the mountains behind. The company placed 1,568 heavy pipes filled with coolant 90 feet deep. It was to freeze the ground to form a deep impenetrable barrier, diverting groundwater to either side of the destroyed six-reactor Fukushima complex and prevent it seeping inside. It has failed to do so, The Guardian reported. In 2016, the Times of London reported that the scheme had only a “minor impact” on the volume of groundwater rushing in, which at the time still averaged 321 tonnes a day. Tepco announced then that it would retrofit the system and fix the leaks, but Science/The Wire reported in January 2022 that the company had admitted that its ice wall was “partially” melting. About 150 tonnes per day still gushes in.

    Filtered sludge burning through containers

    The ALPS filter has produced over 4,000 large containers filled with highly radioactive slurry and sludge left from the treatment.

    Like the use of the word “advanced” in the name of the failed ALPS machinery, the cylinders used for the caustic, highly radioactive sludge are called “High Integrity Containers” or HICs, but in fact they are made of plastic and have degraded far faster than Tepco anticipated.

    By March 2, Tepco had filled 4,143 containers, according to the daily Asahi Shimbun. At 30 cubic feet each, the cylinders now store a total of about 124,290 cubic feet of the highly radioactive sludge that will soon require expensive repackaging and, eventually, isolation from the biosphere for thousands of years.

    Over two years ago, on June 8, 2021, Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) announced that 31 of the containers had “exceeded their lifespans” and were corroded badly enough by the harsh toxic material that they must be replaced. The NRA also warned that another 56 cylinders would need replacing within two years.

    Japan’s Mainichi newspaper reported that the government regulators blamed Tepco for “underestimating the radiation the 31 plastic cylinders were exposed to.” The company then claimed it would start moving the contents to new containers.

    The Asahi Shimbun reported April 27, 2023, that the HICs must be stored in concrete boxes that can block radiation evidently being emitted by the HICs. https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14883115

    Rad waste to be dumped, deregulated

    As early as next month, Japan intends to begin dispersing 1.37 million tonnes of contaminated wastewater into the Pacific Ocean. The government has steadfastly ignored fierce local and international opposition to the plan from the fishing community, marine scientists, Pacific Island nations, environmentalists, South Korea, and China. So far only South Korean politicians have suggested bringing international legal action against the dumping.

    Since the 2011 meltdowns spewed radioactive materials broadly across Japan’s main island, some 14-million tonnes of cesium-contaminated soil, leaves, and debris have been scraped from the ground and stored in one-tonne bags.  Citizens are struggling desperately prevent authorities from using the radioactive waste in road building or burning it in incinerators. The bags are currently stacked in tens of thousands of piles all over the region.

    Even more protest was raised last February 10 when the NRA said it would allow Tepco to severely weaken its monitoring of the wastewater’s radioactivity. The NRA said would but the number of radioactive elements to be measured from 64 to 34.

    The environment minister of Hong Kong — a coastal metropolis of 7.5 million people — charged in June that Japan is “violating its obligations under international law and endangering the marine environment and public health.” Minister Tse Chin-wan wrote in the daily Ta Kung Pao that Hong Kong would “immediately prohibit imports of seafood caught off the coast of Fukushima prefecture.”

    Plutonium Spread Long Distances from Fukushima

    Very few reports of the Fukushima catastrophic releases of radiation have mentioned plutonium contamination. Yet plutonium was used in fuel rods in Fukushima’s reactor number 3 which was destroyed by meltdown and several hydrogen explosions. Plutonium is one of the most toxic substances known to science, and fine particles are far more biologically hazardous than larger particles.

    Following the March 14, 2011 explosion, experts worried about the release of extremely dangerous radioactive substances, and then a week later, on March 21 and 22, Tepco announced that it had detected plutonium in soil collected from its compound. (Fukushima Meltdown: The World’s First Earthquake-Tsunami-Nuclear Disaster, Takashi Hirose, Asahi Shimbun Publications, 2011, p. 51)

    Now, studies published in the journals Science of the Total Environment, Nov. 15, 2020, and Chemosphere, July 2023, report that researchers found that cesium and plutonium “were transported over long distances,” and that deposits of them were recorded in “downtown Tokyo,” about 142 miles from the meltdowns.

    According to the authors, very high concentrations of radioactive cesium were released during the accident as particles referred to as “cesium-rich micro-particles” (CsMPs). The researchers say CsMPs they found are mainly composed of silicon, iron, zinc, and cesium, and minor amounts of radioactive tellurium, technetium, molybdenum, uranium, and plutonium.

    The studies, involving scientists from six countries and led by Associate Professor Satoshi Utsunomiya, a researcher at Kyushu University, found that “plutonium was included inside cesium-rich micro-particles that were emitted from the site.”

    Radioactive CsMPs released from Fukushima are a potential health risk through inhalation. “Given the small size of the particles, they could penetrate into the deepest parts of the lung, where they could be retained,” Utsunomiya wrote. “The route of exposure of greatest concern is inhalation,” the authors reported, because plutonium, lodged in the lungs, can “remain for years.”

    Utsunomiya summed up his team’s work saying, “It took a long time to publish results on particulate [plutonium] from Fukushima … but research on Fukushima’s environmental impact and its decommissioning are a long way from being over.”


    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by John Laforge.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.