Well, the construction in Shanghai has brought millions and millions of workers from rural areas to here. They're usually paid 50 yuan/day, which is about 1500 yuan/month (US$185/month). Normally, one or two accidents happen per building, and some die. There's no life/health insurance for them. Their families might not even know it happened.

Huge amounts of people from other areas coming here has increased crime. People were robbed in the streets in daylight by groups of people from xinjiang etc.

The real estate boom was started by accommodative policies. For example, mortgages that were just given. In 2001 when my parents and I came back to China from the US, we were living in our grandmother's house for the while. Then we bought a house here. We got all our taxes for the year back for buying the house, not just some mortgage deduction thing. Though that policy ended a year or two ago.

Housing prices have mainly doubled or tripled. The price of a flat in a high rise near to my home has doubled in 3 years. (I should know, since my parents were considering buying one there)

I think the construction will continue in cities and so on. Shanghai is obviously one of the "crown jewels" so to speak, but I believe in time, we'll see other places become similar to Shanghai.

The real estate bubble seems to have burst, though I think the fundamentals are rather bullish. As I have heard a lot about real estate in the news etc half a year ago, and then about prices going down and not much anymore (good time to look for potential buys I suppose, as people are not interested in real estate anymore), the sentiment was speculative.

My aunt who makes 700 yuan a month (US$87/month) (as a shop assistant), my uncle about the same (working for a near broke state owned factory), took out a 20 year mortgage and bought a very small flat for 200,000 yuan (US$24,740) a year ago. She was very proud and told us about it when we met. She wanted us to go visit it:-p. I think the house is probably worth only about 150,000 yuan (US$18,550) now. Prices tumbled 20% a few months ago, and are still declining I believe. I bet she heard stuff about real estate a hedge against inflation, how this guy made money in real estate, how that guy became rich in real estate, how real estate would never go down and would go up in the long term etc crap like that ;).

My parents were talking about that same thing, how if they bought a more expensive flat, it would be worth more now. I tell them paper profits are nothing. We (being thrifty Chinese) aren't going to take out a mortgage on our house, using our HELOC (or rather abusing it like the Amercians :D). So the value is just on paper. Since we'll have to live there, we won't be able to cash out...

The government has had a macroeconomic cooling down policy since last year (ended early this year?) trying to ease the speculation and bubbles. I remember they hiked interest rates then. Eased them again:-\... Not too sure, hard to find such info and they don't make headlines... People here think of interest rates as cash rates instead of the central bank discount/funds rate. And I don't pay that much attention to domestic news ;).

These are mainly my own experiences. I'm sorta a geek, just stay at home and do stuff, I've never seen most of the slides in the video! But then again, I pay more attention to global affairs, mainly since it would make little difference if I paid attention to "nearer" things ;-).

Yours,
(name withheld by me)

P.S. The bears are struggling; I'm kinda unsure how this will develop if the market closes strong again this week. And btw, some newbie was asking me about stocks. So he told me he wanted to buy gold stocks :-p. I'm afraid that makes the sentiment in gold a bit speculative. And me and my friends have gotten a huge amount of crap about the dollar going down the drain.