The Telegraph reports on China’s property market:
The sight of a “real” alpine village rising from the grimy industrial suburbs of Huairou outside Beijing provokes an increasingly common reaction when discussing China’s property market: “You’ve got to be kidding me, right?”
With its alpine clock tower soaring 200ft into the murk emitted by nearby chimneys, the “Spring Legend” development offers a Disney-style version of a lifestyle that the residents of Huairou and Beijing can realistically aspire to.
“The air is so fresh it penetrates your heart,” waxes the sales brochure, a claim that requires a suspension of belief equally demanded by Spring Legend’s ersatz palm trees, faux red English phone boxes and plant pots brimming with plastic alpine flowers.
Making sense of such developments, along with the forests of empty new office blocks in Beijing and the tripling of land prices in some Chinese cities over the last 12 months, is now leading some heavyweight investors to cry “bubble”.
