Country Garden’s Stock Plunges After Report of Huge Losses

“Another real estate giant is going to fall. Evergrande collapsed, will Country Garden be next?” Guo Guosong, an author and former journalist, wrote in a comment.

Others piled on, and the conversation online lit up by early afternoon, when more than 100 million people had viewed the comments under the hashtag “Evergrande is insolvent.”

For years, Chinese developers took on huge piles of debt to expand into cities around the country, selling apartments before they were completed. Along the way, their top executives joined the ranks of Asia’s richest tycoons. Evergrande’s failure in 2021 put a spotlight on the industry’s practices when it set off a cascade of similar collapses in real estate, and millions of people were left with unfinished apartments.

“These real estate tycoons are making a lot of money, but the company is in a mess, the money goes into their pockets and the mess is the government’s,” wrote Sun Guoyu, whose verified social media account said he was the chairman of a company called Shenzhen Neteye Holdings.

“Systemic problems, ordinary people pay the bill,” he added.

The pent-up public anger over China’s housing sector has been years in the making and has spilled out onto the streets at times. But the fate of Country Garden, one of the country’s last standing giants and a company that had been seen as a more responsible player, appears to have been behind Friday’s torrent of frustration. Some wondered: What happened to the money that home buyers gave to the property developers, since there are so few finished apartments to show for it?