Urbanization and Real Estate Investment in China Asie.Visions 22, December 2009

The move away from a planned economy and the apprenticeship of capitalism, which is sometimes uncontrolled in the real estate sector, have led to a series of imbalances between cities and the countryside. It is possible to think that the worst imbalances (in terms of the human and environmental costs of urbanization), which were wittingly accepted for a long time in order to allow the country to open up and to promote break-neck growth, are tolerated less and less and becoming politically intolerable. Urbanization has definitively and deeply modified daily life in China and the expectations of the population, even if these are not expressed in the ballot box. This article assesses China's unprecedented urbanization movement and describes the changes in China's rules of the game, together with the emergence of a more-or-less chaotic real estate market.