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Small investors, builders and home buyers count the cost of Evergrande exposures

Residential buildings under construction at Evergrande Cultural Tourism City, a project developed by China Evergrande Group, in Suzhou's Taicang, Jiangsu province, China. Photo: Reuters Expand

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Residential buildings under construction at Evergrande Cultural Tourism City, a project developed by China Evergrande Group, in Suzhou's Taicang, Jiangsu province, China. Photo: Reuters

Residential buildings under construction at Evergrande Cultural Tourism City, a project developed by China Evergrande Group, in Suzhou's Taicang, Jiangsu province, China. Photo: Reuters

Residential buildings under construction at Evergrande Cultural Tourism City, a project developed by China Evergrande Group, in Suzhou's Taicang, Jiangsu province, China. Photo: Reuters

Josh Horwitz and David Kirton

At an eerily quiet construction site in eastern China’s Suzhou, worker Li Hongjun says property developer Evergrande’s debt crisis means he will soon run out of food.

Christina Xie, who works in export in the bustling southern city of Shenzhen, fears Evergrande has swallowed her life savings.

The pair, united like legions of others by their connections to the vast China Evergrande Group, show the scale of the challenge facing the Chinese government in managing its financial woes, although economists downplay the risk of a “Lehman moment” style collapse.

Evergrande, with outstanding debts of $305bn (€260bn), recently stopped repaying some investors and suppliers and halted building work at projects across the country, setting off global alarm bells over upcoming interest payments.

Mr Li, who says he has not been paid since August, is doing minimal maintenance among half-finished apartment blocs whose outer shells hide rubble-filled interiors. Sand and concrete slabs cover a just-finished marble floor in one future home.

“In the past two days I’ve been planning to go to the government,” he said. “What can I do? Soon I’ll have no food to eat. If I have no food to eat I’ll have to go to the government to eat.”

Ms Xie put 380,000 yuan (€49,000) of savings into a wealth management product sold by Evergrande and says she did not receive a payout of 30,000 yuan due to her earlier this month.

“It’s all my savings. I was planning to use it for me and my partner’s old age. I worked day and night saving, now it’s game over,” said Ms Xie, who was told that the wealth management product that she bought would yield 7.5pc a year.

“Evergrande is one of China’s biggest real estate companies ... my consultant told me the product was guaranteed.”

Ms Xie still hopes to be able to redeem her investment, one of billions of yuan in wealth management products (WMPs) sold by Evergrande, but she is not satisfied with any of the options suggested.

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Evergrande did not immediately reply to a request for comment, but chairman Hui Ka Yan told a late-night meeting on Wednesday that the top priority is to help investors redeem their products and that home deliveries should be ensured.

Angry homebuyers and retail investors launched protests in several cities in recent weeks – anathema to China’s stability-obsessed ruling Communist Party.

Property accounts for 40pc of assets owned by Chinese households, according to Macquarie, which means contagion from a potentially messy Evergrande collapse could reverberate beyond households and investors to suppliers and construction workers.

A crackdown on debt in the sector has ended a freewheeling era of building with borrowed money, which became infamous for ghost cities and roads to nowhere.

“It is important from a social stability standpoint to make sure that Chinese retail investors get their money back and that homebuyers get their homes,” said Carlos Casanova, senior economist for Asia at Union Bancaire Privee.

Analysts at Capital Economics estimated that as of end-June, Evergrande still had to complete around 1.4 million properties, around 1.3 trillion yuan (€170bn) in pre-sale
liabilities.

One woman who bought an Evergrande property in the north-eastern city of Shenyang and asked not to be identified has been waiting since April 2020.

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