It's hard for foreigners to understand:

Why are Chinese people so obsessed with owning property.

Because they don't understand:

What Chinese people truly fear has never been poverty.

But rather, being rootless and adrift.

Europeans and Americans can rent their whole lives.

Because modernization there accomplished something else:

The system catches the individual.

But China is different.

The cruelest part of China's modernization is:

It destroyed the traditional rural society,

But did not truly establish a modern civil society.

Clans have disintegrated,

Danwei (work units) have disappeared,

Land has lost its meaning,

Individuals have not truly gained stable property rights or institutional security.

Thus, people can only desperately cling to a house.

Because the house has become the last visible form of attachment.

A life-saving straw.

The problem is:

What Chinese real estate is really selling has never been a place to live.

It's just a temporary narcotic to escape fear.