Qiu Baoxing: Establish a classification support system to transform the supply ecosystem for "quality housing"
The following is a summary of Qiu Baoxing's comments during a roundtable discussion at the 49th Tsinghua University Forum on China and the World Economy held at Tsinghua University, Beijing, and broadcasted online on July 2, 2025. Qiu is an Academician of the China Science Center of the International Eurasian Academy of Sciences and former Vice Minister of the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development of the People's Republic of China.
On July 2, 2025, the 49th Tsinghua University Forum of China and the World Economy, hosted by Tsinghua University's Academic Center for Chinese Economic Practice and Thinking (ACCEPT) in partnership with the university's School of Social Sciences, was broadcasted online under the theme of "China's 2025 Mid-Year Economic Update." Academician of the China Science Center of the International Eurasian Academy of Sciences and former Vice Minister of the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development of the People's Republic of China, Qiu Baoxing, participated in a roundtable discussion at the forum alongside other distinguished guests where he commented on the latest developments in China's real estate sector.
Qiu noted that there is still ample room left for China to implement policies to regulate and control the real estate sector, with the country's institutional advantages concentrated and embodied in its harmonized system for coordinating regulations and controls between central and local governments. Compared with the structural limitations placed on the private land tenure system in Western countries, China has granted its local governments with certain functions as investment entities, which has led to the creation of a policy multiplier effect through a mechanism for redistributing the gains from land use. At present, there is an urgent need to systematically improve abilities to apply policy tools, including solving the problem of path dependency among some local governments. On the issue of liquidating housing stock, the model for supplying affordable housing has already laid the groundwork necessary for purchasing and stockpiling converted residential units, although there are three obstacles that must be overcome before proceeding to implementation. First, the lack of a market-orientated pricing mechanism generates a conflict between the goals of preserving asset values on the one hand and liquidating excess housing stock on the other hand. Second, the local-level housing development system suffers from functional inertia as a result of its tendency to overvalue new construction and undervalue revitalization. Third, there are institutional gaps that remain for transforming the commercial real estate sector.
