The Malaysian Insider :: Features
The Malaysian Insider :: Features |
| Chinese cities fret as land sales fall Posted: 02 Nov 2011 02:18 AM PDT  Residential buildings are seen in the Pudong district of Shanghai in this October 26, 2011 file photo. China's 'land market is cooling down so quickly, it's as if all the property developers vanished overnight,' said an official recently. – Reuters pic Now, the centre is eerily quiet, as moves by the national government to rein in the country's once-roaring property market have taken hold. "The land market is cooling down so quickly – it's as if all the property developers vanished overnight," said an official at the department that handles government land sales for Changsha, a central Chinese city of 7 million. "Now we have to go out and find buyers by ourselves. It is really a hard time," added the woman, who declined to give her name. The city government in Changsha, once known for machine-making and now becoming a hub for China's TV and creative industry, has good reason to be nervous about declining land sales. Without hefty income from such sales, Changsha faces problems paying its bills, which include heavy debt-servicing. Many other cities are in the same, potentially precarious position. Yesterday, two days after Beijing pledged to "unswervingly" maintain property curbs, a major auction for 12 plots in the southern city of Guangzhou was abruptly cancelled, without explanation, just three hours before opening. Changsha could find itself unable to borrow more money and to pay for the kind of investment projects that have kept local economies – and the national economy – humming at near-double digit rates. WHERE'S THE MONEY? "Without income from land sales, where can we get enough money to build roads, schools, hospitals and other projects that Beijing ordered us to do?" asked a man surnamed Wang who works at Changsha's land auction centre. Lacking other steady sources of revenue, city and provincial governments across the country have come to depend on land sales, often turning farmland – still ultimately owned by the state – over to developers via auctions. The model worked well enough while China's land values rose, as they have most of the past decade. But across the country, sales are slowing and prices are sagging. "Most cities in China could see their revenue base drying up with land sales shrinking noticeably," said Qiao Yongyuan, an analyst at CEBM, a private investment advisory firm in Shanghai. "It would take them a relatively long time to find a new source of sustainable revenue," he added. As many cities, including Changsha, have funded massive expansion efforts with borrowed money, economists warn that a continued fall in land prices could eventually trigger a wave of debt defaults and produce a new crop of bad loans in the banking system. That could destabilise the world's second-largest economy, which expanded in the third quarter at its weakest pace since early 2009. PILLAR OF THE ECONOMY Real estate is a pillar of China's economy, with property investment accounting for 12 per cent of GDP and 25 per cent of total fixed asset investment in 2010. Zhang Zhiwei, chief China economist at Nomura Securities in Hong Kong, says the full impact of declining land sales will only become clear gradually – and it could prove big. "Over time, the cooling land market could affect the Chinese economy in a much broader way, although most of the pressure would be felt by some local governments." When Beijing moved to curb rising property prices in late 2009, the average home price in 70 major cities was rising 7.8 per cent a year . The central government has adopted steps from raising mortgage rates and down-payments to making buyers pay property tax for the first time. In late 2009, Beijing began moves to curb soaring property prices. The surge peaked in April 2010, when home-prices in 70 major cities rose 12.8 per cent on average from a year earlier. Later, the government introduced more moves, and this year the measures seem finally to have taken hold. All signs point to a downturn – or at least an end to price rises – for land. In the first nine months this year, 17 of the top 30 cities had lower land-sale revenue than a year earlier, and in three places the fall topped 35 per cent, according to industry data. And for most cities, average prices are dropping. Most Chinese cities are driven to sell land to pay their debts, a partial legacy of an investment binge under Beijing's 4 trillion yuan (RM1.97 billion) stimulus package to cope with the 2008 global financial crisis. At the end of 2010, China's local governments had 10.7 trillion yuan worth of debt, according to the National Audit Office. Cities "will surely face stress trying to meet their repayments," said Hui Jianqiang, the head of research at E-house China, a real estate information provider. VICIOUS CYCLE OF STRAIN Credit Suisse said in a recent report that loan losses at Chinese banks may be equivalent to 60 per cent of their equity capital if real-estate companies and local governments fail to repay debts. The possibility that cities could default may make it more difficult for their local financing vehicles to raise capital through bond issues or bank loans. That could drop local governments into a vicious circle of cash strains. That would force some localities to halt unfinished projects or scrap new investments. Suspensions of projects, along with the slowdown in property investment, may eventually weigh on China's fixed-asset investment, the most important driver of Chinese economy. Hangzhou, the capital of eastern Zhejiang province, is counting on land sales to pay back 82 per cent of its debt, which was 83.7 billion yuan at the end of 2010. But it is unlikely to reach its target of 55 billion yuan from land sales this year, which might result in a default on the debt. In northeast Liaoning province, nearly 85 per cent of local government-related financing vehicles missed debt service payments in 2010, according to its audit report published on the local government's website. Some local governments are starting to backpedal on some property tightening measures Beijing has imposed. "Actually, we are not following Beijing's order as strictly as required," said the woman at the centre who bemoaned the vanishing of buyers. She said it isn't hard for residents to find loopholes and skirt rules barring the purchase of a third home in the city. WOOING INVESTORS Changsha is not alone. The southern city of Foshan last week announced that it would relax restrictions on home purchases, although it later suspended that move to study the possible impact. In Changsha, officials are trying to find ways to lure developers back. For example, instead of openly auctioning a plot, officials are now privately approaching some developers, promising to sell land at a relatively lower price. That could be a "more realistic way" to win sales when the dimming market has made bidders cautious, said Shu Tingfei, a property analyst at Shanghai Securities Co. The Changsha centre also allowed more land to be developed for residential use, as developers are shunning commercial projects, which usually cost more to complete. In the first nine months of 2011, the southwestern city of Kunming put up for sale 21 million square meters, or more than four times as much land as a year earlier, according to the China Real Estate Index System. In Changsha, officials fret about the financial impact of the market going from hot to cold. "You can say that our city was somehow kidnapped by the land market and it is not something sustainable," said the woman in Changsha's land auction centre. "But for now, we haven't found a way out." – Reuters Full content generated by Get Full RSS. |
| Macau’s ‘sweet language’ on verge of disappearing Posted: 01 Nov 2011 08:09 PM PDT MACAU, Nov 2 — Dona Aida de Jesus is 96 years old and still runs the family restaurant in Macau. She is also something even more remarkable: one of the last custodians of a dying language. "My friends all died, nobody speaks Patua with me any more," says de Jesus, as she helps serve Brazilian black beans, Portuguese stewed fish and Chinese choi sum to customers in her restaurant, Riquexo. De Jesus' mother tongue is Patua, once also known as "Christian speech" or the "sweet language of Macau" — a creole that blends Portuguese with Cantonese and Malay, plus traces of Hindi, Japanese and the languages of other stops on the travels of the Portuguese over the past few centuries.  Dona Aida de Jesus speaks Patua — a creole that blends Portuguese with Cantonese and Malay, plus traces of Hindi, Japanese and the languages of other stops on the travels of the Portuguese over the past few centuries. — AFP/Relaxnews pic In 2009 Patua was classified by Unesco as "critically endangered". Local enthusiasts say that only a handful of original, fluent speakers like de Jesus remain in Macau, and perhaps a few hundred overseas among the Macanese diaspora. Since Macau was handed back to the Chinese in 1999, and then swelled into the world's largest gambling city, bigger forces that had already got the better of Patua seemed to sound its death knell. "It has lost its social utility," admits Miguel Senna Fernandes, a lawyer who has headed the effort to hold onto Patua as a medium of Macanese culture. "Reviving Patua is giving life to a lost memory." But Fernandes' energetic arrival on the Patua scene, plus a growing awareness of heritage in general, have helped to place Patua, as local journalist Harald Bruning says, "on life support". Fernandes writes and directs a satirical community Patua play every year, which revives a tradition dating back at least a century. He adapts the language to mock contemporary Macau. His most recent production, "Que Pandalhada!", took pandas as its theme, after two giant pandas arrived in Macau from the central government to much fanfare to mark the tenth anniversary of the handover to China. Through a host of characters, including one in a panda suit, the play poked fun at the government and striking workers, to much hilarity from the audience. Yet to learn Patua at all, Fernandes had to persuade his reluctant grandmother to explain the words. One of the key reasons for Patua's downfall was a policy in Portuguese-language schools of discouraging and even punishing the use of what was seen as a debased language. Fernandes characterises this attitude, which pervaded through the 19th and much of the 20th centuries, as "Boy, you speak proper Portuguese! Don't speak this rubbish!" Dating back to the 16th century, when the first Portuguese travellers arrived in Macau from Malacca — where a related creole, Papia Kristang, is still spoken by a small community — the language later began to bloom when colonists intermarried with locals. They brought along some words used by their African slaves for good measure. But as education spread in the 19th century, Patua declined, and by the start of the 20th century it had become a women's language. It was spoken in homes, with children and sometimes on the street, not in schools or workplaces. This meant its functions were limited, but poets like the 20th-century writer Jose dos Santos Ferreira — known as Adé and still revered by the community — treasured it for its rawness, as well as its reflection of a lively hybrid culture. "It was the voice of the common Macanese," said Fernandes. Fernandes says one of his favourite words in the language is "saiang", a Malay-derived word for "longing" similar to the Portuguese "saudade".  In 2009 Patua was classified by Unesco as "critically endangered". — Reuters file pic Another word reflects the arrival of the British in neighbouring Hong Kong: a "beefy" is a vaguely pejorative word for an English or English-speaking person. Although Patua's foundations are in Portuguese, its grammar is more like Cantonese: it does not conjugate verbs, and words are repeated for emphasis. In many ways Patua, already based on archaic Portuguese, is now frozen in time. Noronha, who also heard Patua spoken by ageing relatives when he was a child, said he would not know how to describe an iPhone or cappuccino in the language. Instead it has words like "caxa hap-loh", a Portuguese-Cantonese fusion word describing a traditional box given to the groom's family by the bride's relatives at weddings, and "barung", a Southeast Asian word used in Macau for an all-purpose kitchen cleaver. Noronha said that the identity of the Macanese themselves, of whom about 8,000 still live in Macau, is increasingly diluted. Large numbers left before the handover to the Chinese, for economic reasons or fearing discrimination. Now, many young people with Macanese heritage would simply describe themselves as Chinese, while there is just one Portuguese-language school left in Macau. But Macanese culture still survives in other ways: those same young people may well cook and eat "ta-chu", a Portuguese hotpot adapted to contain Chinese sausage and pork skin, and served with a pungent Malay shrimp sauce called balichao. Since Fernandes began his campaign in the early 1990s, young people with no previous knowledge of Patua have joined his theatre group, which receives government funding. However, in a territory where 95 per cent of people are ethnically Chinese, Fernandes says the government can appear lukewarm: "They want to preserve, but they don't know exactly what they are preserving." Bruning, of the Macau Daily Post, has become a passionate Patua campaigner despite coming from Germany. He is urging that audio recordings be made of fluent speakers like de Jesus while the opportunity is still there. Still, Bruning is sanguine about the chances of Patua surviving in some form. "It's on its deathbed and the doctors are rushing in, but more has been done in this decade than in many before," he said. "Nowadays there is a chance of keeping the memory alive." — AFP/Relaxnews Full content generated by Get Full RSS. |
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