Presenting his annual report to China’s National People’s Congress on Saturday, Wen Jiabao pledged to “firmly curb the excessively rapid rise in housing prices”. It was a promise the prime minister has been making for much of the past year.
Indeed, it was at last year’s meeting of the political elite that the furore over rising house prices burst into the open. More than half of the proposals submitted by delegates were related to the cost of buying an apartment.
Weeks earlier, the authorities had shut down a popular soap opera that explored the lives of urban “wage slaves” struggling to pay their mortgage. “It has become the biggest political issue in China,” says Hu Xingdou, an economics professor at the Beijing Institute of Technology.
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