China's Stuttering Local Land Sales

choi

Rahul Jacob, China's Stuttering Local Land Sales Programme Poses Threat to Growth; Guangzhou; City governments face an increase in debt as revenue from selling off property dries up. Financial Times, Dec 8, 2011.

Quote:

"Last month the [Guangzou] city government has to cancel or drastically scale back its plan to auction land four times because cash-strapped private developers were nervous about Beijing's raft of measures to cool property prices.

"'The sale of 32 sites was cancelled within two weeks. There has never been a situation like this in the history of Guangzhou,' says Peng Peng, a local academic. In the first nine months of this year, the government collected just Rmb14bn ($2.2bn( in revenues from land sales versus a target for 2011 of RMB50bn after Rmb45.5bn was raised in 2010.

"Land sales typially account for about 40 per cent of local government revenues, which Chinese city and county governments rly on to finance large infrastructure projects.

"For the wider Chinese economy, the problem is more serious: China relies on large investment projects to boost and maintain its high gross domestic product growth rate

My comment:
(a) There is no need to read the rest.
(b) stutter (vi): "to move or act in a halting or spasmodic manner <the old jalopy bucks and stutters uphill — William Cleary>"
www.m-w.com

(2) 盖茨公司助中国建新型核反应堆. BBC Chinese, Dec 8, 2011
http://www.bbc.co.uk/zhongwen/si ... 8_gates_china.shtml

Note:
(a) Based in Bellevue, Washington, TerraPower is developing traveling wave reactor.
http://www.terrapower.com/
(b) It seems that this novel reactor is under development (if not just on blueprint), but not tested. New York Times had a couple of reports on this.