This Good Morning From London
Column believes that Washington knows, for sure, that China will, by 2028, become the largest economic power in the world. The US knows that it will be edged into second place + the world has under-estimated the harm this will do to the US psyche. But more of that another day. Today this column focuses on the surge of Chinese money investing in US property.
The Washington based National Association of Realtors announced in its February 2022 Outlook that approximately $700m worth of Chinese money had entered the US commercial property market in the year ending 30 September 2021 – up from $600 in the previous 12 months. The Group’s CEO, Kashif Ansari, predicts that when the Chinese begin to travel again – post-Covid – “the rebound in Chinese property acquisition in the US will rapidly gain pace…the US home market is very appealing to Chinese buyers”. California, Georgia, New York + Michigan were the top four US destinations for Chinese residential property money as of March 2021. China became the leading foreign buyer of US real estate in 2012 according to the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
This development is another retort to those who view the emergence of China as a rerun of the USSR after the 1917 Revolution. Such a viewpoint consigns China to the same fate as the USSR but the differences between the two Revolutions – 1917 and China in 1949 – are considerable and their significance is lost on many people who predict, quite mechanically + quite wrongly, that China will fail just as the USSR failed.
The USSR citizens never bought the property in the US. The same people never travelled overseas + tourism into the USSR was negligible when compared with – prior to Covid – the large number of visitors to China. Many observers of China fail to see that China is well aware of the mistakes of the USSR and is determined not to repeat them.
