Thread by @WeiDuCNA

3 homebuyers who paid for homes they can’t get tell their stories of hope and despair. I believe it’d be the first time you heard personal stories from China’s #mortgageboycott on TV.

The Great Fall Of China's Housing Market: Who Will Pay The Price?

I’m grateful to the interviewees who overcame fears of “foreign influence” and defied pressure from family, peers, govts and unknown thugs. It’s been the hardest in my career getting people to talk. This happening in the country I grew up was to me incredible.

We contacted abt 3 dozen ppl who posted abt their rotten tail homes and mortgage boycott plans online. Only a handful responded, and most of them later pulled out becuz “China’s problems are China’s solve, no part for ‘foreign influence’ to play.”

One person wanted to know if we were “patriots.” As proof, he wanted my colleague to sing the national anthem. The growing tendency to see any interest or concern from outside the country as malicious shouldn’t have been surprise, but it’s something to experience first hand.

The sensitivity and zero-Covid made logistics hellish. I didn’t want crews to cross provincial borders in case they got stuck, or worse, grabbed by local police. They came back with things that surprised us time and again: intimate personal stories, local scenes rich in texture.

Biggest surprise of all: Older generations in China had 3-4 lines to fall back on for every situation. Everyone said the same thing. I had wondered if they didn’t have the words to describe how they felt, or they simply stopped feeling the emotions that propaganda didn’t allow.

But Chinese millennials speak in their own words, small but precise. Like Americans in This American Life, or Russians in The Voices of Chernobyl. It doesn’t give you goosebumps, but it makes your heart ache. I wish they speak more often, because we hear them.

And my thanks to the experts who provided invaluable perspectives on the story, in particular @michaelxpettis, the only person in mainland China who would speak to me. (Even Dr Doom of China didn’t want his face on TV talking about this.)