Chinese money funnelled to far-flung homes heralds bubble trouble

SHANGHAI/BEIJING (May 26): When a 59-year-old accountant in Shanghai wanted to invest for her looming retirement, she bought two cheap apartments -- on the other side of the country.

“When friends told me about a chance to buy properties in Xishuangbanna, I thought ‘why not?”’ said Yuan Junxi, talking of the steamy, subtropical region in Yunnan province, bordering Laos and Myanmar. “No buying limits; cheap, easy mortgages; and maybe property prices will jump over there too.”

Buyers such as Yuan, a mother-of-one who borrowed to help fund her purchases of 280,000 yuan ($56,000) each in the city of Jinghong last month, are spreading the risk of bubbles to ever-smaller places in China’s provinces, after a crackdown by the government took some of the froth out of the property market over the past 14 months.

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