Shares in crisis-hit Chinese property giant Evergrande have been suspended in Hong Kong amid reports its chairman has been placed under police surveillance.
It follows reports earlier this week that other current and former executives had also been detained.
Thursday’s market statement did not give a reason for the trading halt.
But it marks another low for the heavily indebted property giant which defaulted in 2021, triggering China’s current real estate market crisis.
In August, the firm filed for bankruptcy in New York, in a bid to protect its US assets as it worked on a multi-billion dollar deal with creditors.
Am I supposed to think a government holding the people running businesses (apparently very poorly in this case) accountable for their actions is a bad thing?
The question is are they being held accountable for doing something illegal, or are they being prosecuted for running a business poorly? One is good, the other is overreach.
Then again, considering how deeply involved the CCP is with large Chinese businesses this could be seen as a completely internal issue.
Chinese government overreach? Surely hell has frozen over /s
I guess both given the massive scale of the business and its massive impacts on the whole economy is reasonable
A public statement “z is detained for y” is generally expected compared to the usual “no one has seen x from china lately, they probably got held by the govt”
A bit too late for that isnt it? Chinese government has been propping up ghost shit building for years and now that shit is going down and all of their pockets are full they drop some scapegoats. You just can’t lose as an authoritarian huh.
I definitely can applaud their government for potentially holding them accountable. However they’re not arrested yet, and more importantly it’s not like this was a secret or fraud per se. We’ve been hearing about China’s “ghost cities” for a number of years now. Buildings built without people in them, buildings half built or only the shell to look complete, and that’s through media that’s allowed to escape their walled garden of information. To me there’s no way that even Xi himself didn’t know that Evergande or Country Garden wasn’t out defrauding the average Chinese citizen. So while good on them for putting them under surveillance today, it’s also terrible of them to have let this gone on.
I’m also an American though so my information may be limited on this subject matter since I’m not a focused person on one country or field.
The problem with using ghost cities as a metric is that China has a lot of pent up demand to urbanize and those cities would get filled within a few years. That pent up demand is what led to a generation of growth.
However, the plan works until it doesn’t.
China seems to have hit a limit on growth and that limit seems correlated to population growth instead of COVID. Worse, housing investment is a key way that people save for retirement. Even worse, municipalities and provinces can’t raise their own taxes, so they’ve been incentivized to keep building even as the national government has been trying to put the breaks on the economy.
There might have been some criminal malfeasance, but there is also a failure of public policy from the national level down. Part of it may be why Xi has become more autocratic in the past few years; the party is going through its first recession in a generation and this is new ground for them.
Well, a significant part of this can be resolved nicely by creating a comprehensive welfare system. Just off the top of my head - buy out the apartments purchased as investment and provide good pensions in their place. Then people won’t feel the need to participate in this failing market and won’t be affected of its potential collapse. I’ve been wondering why there’s no proper welfare system in China and I recently stumbled upon info that Xi believes welfare makes people lazy. So that’s a problem. If I were a Chinese citizen whose bought into the social contract with the CCP, I’d expect the construction of a good welfare system out of it.
Yes, you are supposed to think that a government imprisoning a subject that has committed no crime is a bad thing
Where did you get this information that no crime has been committed and they are just being detained for shits and giggles?
The article?
I don’t know where you live, but in my country people get charged with crimes, then arrested.
The article says no such thing.
And I’m pretty sure your country has some form of investigative detention. If you’re American that can last up to 48 hours. And it really doesn’t matter because authorities there can just throw out charges, deny bail, blackmail people with absurd incarceration lengths into confessing their guilt, and detain them for years before a trial (or forever in some cases). And at any point in time those charges can be dropped.
And if you really want to go into the pros and cons between different justice systems, we can do that but it doesn’t really have much to do with being a tankie or not.
If you’re poor sure, but not CEOs for white collar crime
Bernie Madoff was out and about until convicted
Is that supposed to be a good thing?
Yes, innocent until proven guilty
He literally turned himself in and admitted to his crimes before then
So only half building homes and running off with the money isn’t a crime? I see no issue arresting some rich fucks who are screwing the common man
Where do you live? In North America, you get arrested, then you get charged.
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