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In the Balance: Chinese property

Factual

Chinese property

07/01/2012

BBC World Service - In the Balance, Chinese property

Is the Chinese property market the next financial disaster waiting to happen?

Is the Chinese property market the next financial disaster waiting to happen? Justin Rowlatt hosts the BBC's lively new business and economics discussion programme.

The eurozone crisis is usually presented as the most worrying trend in the world economy but is it?  Are there even more frightening crises around, just ones we haven't been paying quite as much attention to?  

The strongest contender has to be the Chinese property market.  Is it on the verge of a catastrophic collapse? There are reports that prices in Beijing and Shanghai are already on the slide and sales are down dramatically.

The continued explosive economic growth in China has been one of the key factors keeping the entire world economy ticking over in recent years so if the property market bombed that might threaten the wider Chinese economy and the world.  

One manager of a major hedge fund has described the threat as like "Dubai times 1,000 - but worse". So is that right?

Presenter Justin Rowlatt is joined from Beijing by Xie Tao who is professor of political science at the Beijing Foreign Studies University and in London by Dr Kent Deng of the Economic history department at the London School of Economics and Duncan Innes-Ker, who is a senior Asia editor at the Economist Intelligence Unit.

And we'll also be asking the panel what to make of the Chinese government's decision to set its sights on the moon. Why on earth - so to speak - would you fund a space programme when hundreds of millions of Chinese people still live in abject poverty.

(Image: A worker standing on scaffolding at a construction site for a new shopping complex in Hefei, in eastern China. Credit: AFP/Getty)

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