中国是个泡沫吗？过去一年来，外部市场的看法从一个极端——没有确凿证据支持的观点——猛然转向另一个极端。
一年前，人们普遍认为，中国面临增长疲弱的局面，而数百万失业大军将造成社会动荡。事实证明这种观点是错误的。到去年年中的时候，主流观点认为，中国引人瞩目的增长将继续加速。这也将被证明是错误的。
本月，传奇卖空者吉姆•夏诺斯(Jim Chanos)带来了这样的观点：中国是“所有泡沫之源”。又错了。
对卖空者来说，草草审视一下各类指标，自然会得出这样的结论：“显而易见”，中国是一个巨大的泡沫。我们同意，中国经济存在许多扭曲现象和系统性的资本定价不合理。
但问题在于，中国经济运行中的许多方面并不是显而易见的，尤其是对于那些不肯费心了解中国非同寻常的政治经济结构的人来说。
要理解这一点，最简单的方法是观察房地产市场。悲观主义者注意到，中国商业写字楼市场存在严重的过度建设现象，房价相对于居民收入明显偏高。因此，房价肯定会崩盘，从而给经济造成可怕后果。
前提是对的：商业写字楼市场存在过度建设，房价相对收入来说偏高。但我们不能如此直截了当地做出结论。
商业写字楼市场对宏观经济的影响微弱，因为它们只占总体房地产建筑数量的20%。即使这块市场崩盘且连年低迷，也不会对重工业需求产生实质性影响。住宅才是关键所在。
但住宅市场存在多种隐性补贴，这使得许多人能够购买价格远高于自己收入所能承受水平的住房，而且几乎不用贷款。这既为房价节节攀升提供了支撑，也降低了房贷风险导致银行业崩盘的几率。
中国大约80%的城市居民拥有自己的住房——对于一个1998年才开始实行住房私有化的国家来说，这是一个令人惊讶的数字。相比之下，在多数西方国家，平均住房拥有率在60%左右。
使居民能够拥有住房的最大因素是隐性政府补贴。三分之一的住房拥有者是在最初的房改期间，以补贴价从工作单位购买住房的。
只要这些隐性补贴继续对市场产生影响——许多如今向往高档住宅的城市居民，开始时购买的都是面积较小的政府补贴房——房价就能够继续保持畸高。
最终（即未来五年左右），房价将不得不走向正常，新的住宅建设将需要反映新一代低收入城市居民的基本需求，而非当前城市中产阶层的财富储存需求。
政府政策应预见到这一转变，并通过征收物业税和鼓励开发更多廉价住房，促进这一转变。开征物业税将有助于降低房价，并为地方政府开通一条可持续的收入来源。
与此同时，在高档住宅利润率如此之高的情况下，私人开发商缺乏兴建老百姓买得起的住房的动机。与新加坡和香港不同，中国内地没有国家或地方一级的负责廉价房建设的住房管理部门。
没有人认为，中国房地产市场的失衡和不公平现象不严重。但我们预感到，那些押注于中国房地市场将恢复理性的人们，可能等不到中国房地产市场恢复理性，自己就已陷入了破产境地。
译者/杨远
http://www.ftchinese.com/story/001031690
Is China a bubble? External market sentiment has gyrated wildly from one extreme, thinly supported opinion to another over the past year.
A year ago consensus held that China faced feeble growth and social revolt by an army of millions of laid-off workers. That turned out to be wrong. By mid-year consensus believed China's spectacular growth would continue to accelerate. That is turning out wrong, too.
Now the flavour of the month, introduced by legendary short-seller Jim Chanos, is that China is “the mother of all bubbles”. Wrong again.
To the short-sellers, a cursory inspection of various indicators makes it “obvious” that China is a giant bubble. We agree that China's economy suffers from many distortions and systemic mispricing of capital.
But the problem is that a lot of what goes on in China's economy is non-obvious, especially to people who have not bothered to educate themselves on the unusual structure of China's political economy.
The easiest way to understand this is to look at the property market. Pessimists note that China's commercial and office markets are wildly overbuilt, and that house prices are far too high relative to household incomes. Therefore, prices must crash dramatically, with dire consequences for the economy.
The premises are true: the commercial and office markets are overbuilt, and house prices are too high relative to income. But the conclusions do not follow so straightforwardly.
In macroeconomic impact, the commercial and office markets are of marginal relevance since they account for only 20 per cent of real estate construction volume. They could collapse and remain in the doldrums for years without having a material impact on heavy industrial demand. Housing is the key driver.
But here a variety of hidden subsidies enable people to buy much pricier flats than their income alone would allow, and with little leverage. This helps to sustain rising house prices while reducing the chances of a leverage-fuelled banking collapse.
Roughly 80 per cent of China's urban residents own their homes – an astonishing number for a country that only began to privatise its housing stock in 1998. In most Western countries, by comparison, average home-ownership rates are around 60 per cent.
The biggest driver of home ownership has been implicit government subsidies. One-third of home owners purchased their homes at subsidised rates from their work units during the initial housing reform programme.
So long as these hidden subsidies continue to have a market impact – and many Chinese urbanites flipping luxury homes today started with a small, government-subsidised apartment – house prices can continue to look strangely high.
Eventually – meaning over the next five years or so – prices will have to normalise, and new housing construction will need to reflect underlying demand from new, low-income urbanites, rather than the desire of the existing urban middle class to store their wealth.
Government policy should anticipate and encourage this shift, by taxing property values and encouraging the development of more low-cost housing. A property tax would help bring down prices and provide local governments with a sustainable revenue stream.
Private developers, meanwhile, have little incentive to build affordable housing while margins on luxury homes are so much higher. Unlike Singapore or Hong Kong, China has no national or municipal housing authorities responsible for building cheap apartments.
Nobody is arguing that the imbalances and inequities in China's housing market are not great. But we have a hunch that this is a market that can stay irrational longer than those betting against it can remain solvent.
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