What a load of bollocks. The result of not letting prices regulate themselves by pure supply and demand and trying to manipulate them for political expediency. This rubbish has been known not to work since Diocletian's edict of maximum prices, which only served to stop people from producing goods or selling them on the black market, bypassing the edict. With this we have something similar. I don't let you lower the price but in order to sell the house you give away something that is 20% of the value, which, as much as the Chinese government doesn't want it, is a de facto 20% price reduction.
If they would allow this their whole real estate market would come crashing down and with it the entire fake GDP, and everyone knows that if they miss and can't fake anymore their 50-year-long plan of continuous growth they are all sent to the execution platoon!
They are in so much trouble they can't afford to budge on inch
Just look at the chronology, and this comes from SCMP, which is basically the CCP paper for English propaganda:
China Evergrande downplays impact of staff arrests in Shenzhen, as property management unit warns on debtsone week later
China Evergrande says founder Hui Ka-yan under ‘mandatory measures’ for alleged crimes, amid stock trading halt in Hong Kongthey have companies not able to pay debts, prices falling down making those debts unpayable, and on top of that:
Even 1.4 billion people can’t fill all of China’s vacant homes, ex-official admitsThis is a bit like those companies that failed around here.
They poured a ton of cash they got in debt for into coins, the market crash come, their stock went to pennies, the debt skyrocketed, they had to sell the shitcoins basically sealing their fate, and still had no money to pay the debt thus triggering the bankruptcy of those that lent them money also.
And we have some still arguing about debts ratios of 100% when Chinese debts are at 300% since they have province debts, local government debts, central government debt, and country debt, they even stopped realizing that data after Covid since it went completely off track:
https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3018991/chinas-total-debt-rises-over-300-cent-gdp-beijing-loosens.
It doesn't really make sense to limit the price reduction, they are finding ways. Instead of spending 100k on a house and getting 20k back, you spend 80k and it would be the same thing, but because it is not allowed to drop the prices they are doing something like this. It still doesn't make sense though, because it is not the way it should be.
Imagine you have built 1 billion houses that nobody lives in and which are on almost every balance sheet at a certain value and this gets sliced in half, it would turn into a flood of bankruptcies since thousands of companies will see their assets turn worthless.
Think LUNA!
Let the market be whatever it is until people buy the houses, if the construction company has to make a loss, they will have to make a loss.
Even without allowing the companies are fall one after the other, Evergrande, Fantasia, and Country Garden, what do you think will happen if they set the price free?