Monitor | China's built enough housing for everyone. Where is it all?
As measures to cool the mainland's property market take ever more novel forms, the problem isn't a lack of supply, but a choice of policy
In the mainland's big cities - just as in Hong Kong - officials are struggling to contain rising property prices.
There, as here, home prices have risen so far, so fast that even a modest apartment is now beyond the means of the vast majority of first-time buyers.
In Beijing, for example, the asking price on a titchy 37 square metre (400 square foot) flat in a favoured suburb can now reach 3.5 million yuan.
That's the equivalent of almost HK$11,000 a square foot - a price that would be steep even in Hong Kong, where household incomes are twice as high.
In the face of mounting anger, authorities on the mainland, just like in Hong Kong, have promised to step up construction and increase the supply of new housing.
Yet mainland officials' latest attempts to rein in prices - in Beijing the city government has now banned unmarried residents from buying second homes - are a tacit admission that the real problem is not a shortage of housing.