China's property market is unlikely to be a US-style disaster
Households on the mainland are not so saddled with debt as pre-crisis America, and future demand for property is likely to be strong
You would have seen the images: identikit tower blocks reaching for the skies; skeletal cranes standing idle; lifeless blocks of flats amid the detritus of construction.
Photo editors used to turn to these images to illustrate the mainland's "ghost cities". Of late, they seem increasingly apt in indicating a broader malaise: falling property prices; slowing land sales and construction activity; the impending day of reckoning for highly indebted local governments.
Indeed, the consensus now is that policymakers need to stabilise property prices to prevent the rot from spreading to other parts of an economy facing its most serious challenge in years. If a disaster were to sink the economy, the thinking goes, the property market would probably be at the epicentre.
But we see a more nuanced picture. It is one that better reflects the size and diversity of a property market in which there are pockets of distress amid an overall slowdown, but where the stress levels are insufficient to trigger a crash.
Why so? For a start, there's still plenty of evidence that indicates robust end-user demand. This is not speculative demand - successive cooling measures in recent years have driven speculators to seek better returns elsewhere.
Measures to curb rapid gains have been so successful that apparatchiks now fear declining property values could jeopardise the social stability that lies at the heart of government policy.