The Chinese are coming!
The subject has been hitting the headlines of world media over recent years. "Chinese are taking over the world," the Guardian exclaimed in 2011; In 2015, Forbes reported about "Hungry dragon" buying America; and in 2016, the Daily Telegraph warned that Chinese buyers were "targeting Australia."
These headlines mirror the complex feelings about Chinese investment, which have been oscillating between welcome and suspicion, coupled with prejudice, misunderstanding and fear.
Some experts have pointed out that the West's "over-sensitivity" toward China is mainly due to differences in values and ideology, a lingering Cold War mindset and uneasiness over China's rapid growth.
SCAPEGOATING CHINESE
With house prices soaring lately in some major cities of countries such as Canada, Australia, the United States and New Zealand, rhetoric about "Chinese invasion" is growing louder. Media overemphasis on Chinese buyers over other ethnic groups has fuelled public concerns that they are pricing local buyers out of the housing market.
Many surveys and media reports have found that more and more people now believe that offshore buyers, mainly those from China, are to blame for rising house prices.
In New Zealand, the opposition Labor Party sparked a political storm last year with claims that Chinese property investors were fuelling the housing bubble in Auckland.
The accusation has been refuted by new data collected by Land Information New Zealand (LINZ), which shows that only less than 1 percent of homes in the country were sold to offshore Chinese buyers in the first three months of 2016.
It is the first-ever official figures on overseas buyers of New Zealand homes, and right after the figure was released in mid-May, National Party list MP Jian Yang demanded apologies from the Labor Party for scapegoating offshore Chinese property buyers for the country's soaring house prices.
In Australia, speculation that Chinese investors have caused the country's high property prices was buried after sales data collected by Australian university analysts in late 2015 show that Chinese investments made up only 2 percent of the 270-billion-dollar residential market in Australia.
According to analysts from the University of Sydney and the University of Western Sydney, the housing shortage in Australia and hungry local demand have been pushing prices up long before the recent pouring in of Chinese and Asian investments.
WHO'S THE REAL CULPRIT?
Data analysis and statistics have shown that fears and angst over Chinese buyers are often unjustified. Some leading economists and property experts pointed out the real culprit for the housing unaffordability in some countries is domestic fundamentals, and blaming foreign buyers "amounts to barking up the wrong tree."
According to chief economist of the National Bank of Canada, Stefane Marion, the soaring prices in Vancouver and Toronto reflect the rapid growth of employment in both cities and the fact that the population of young people aged 20-44 is growing.
"It's wrong to think the rapidly rising housing prices in these two markets are the result of speculation," he said in a new report, cited by the CBC News in a recent article.
Marion's view was echoed by other experts, including Bank of Montreal senior economist Robert Kavcic.
"It's easy to blame the foreign-buyer boogeymen for the home price gains in Vancouver and Toronto," Kavcic said.
However, "what we do know is that the fundamentals right here at home are strong enough on their own to drive big price gains," said the economist.
Kavcic said rapid population and employment growth in Vancouver and Toronto, lack of developable space and low mortgage rates are the true "culprits" behind the unconscionable rise in house prices.
