China's Xi and top leaders call for halting real estate decline, responding to public concerns

cnbc.com:

BEIJING — China aims to stop the property slump, top leaders said Thursday in a readout of a high-level meeting published by state media.

Authorities «must work to halt the real estate market decline and spur a stable recovery,» the readout said in Chinese, translated by CNBC. It also called for «responding to concerns of the masses.»

Chinese President Xi Jinping led Thursday's meeting of the Politburo, the second-highest circle of power in the ruling Chinese Communist Party, state media said.

The readout said leaders called for strengthening fiscal and monetary policy support, and touched on a swath of issues from employment to the aging population. It did not specify the timeframe or scale of any measures.

«I take the messages from this meeting as a positive step,» Zhiwei Zhang, president and chief economist at Pinpoint Asset Management, said in an email to CNBC. «It takes time to formulate a comprehensive fiscal package to address the economic challenges, [and] the meeting took one step in that direction.»

Stocks in mainland China and Hong Kong extended gains after the news to close sharply higher on Thursday. An index of Chinese property stocks in Hong Kong surged by nearly 12%.

Real estate once accounted for more than a quarter of China's economy. The sector has slumped since Beijing's crackdown in 2020 on developers' high levels of debt. But the decline has also cut into local government revenue and household wealth.

China's broader economic growth has slowed, raising concerns about whether it can reach the full-year GDP target of around 5% without additional stimulus. Just days after the U.S. cut interest rates, the People's Bank of China on Tuesday announced a slew of planned interest rate cuts and real estate