[nl]

lol

Residential real estate construction now accounts for nearly ten percent of the country's total GDP -- four percentage points higher than it did at the peak of the U.S. housing bubble in 2005. Bullish analysts have long argued that large-scale urbanization and rapidly rising incomes warrant such an extraordinary boom.

10% of total GDP is significant, but when the economy is growing at 10% a year[1] it can afford to drop quite a lot without necessarily causing an economic meltdown.

To be clear - I'm not claiming that a drop in real estate prices won't cause problems for the entities involved in the Chinese real estate sector. What I am claiming is that it might not be as catastrophic as people expect based on the US experience.

[1] http://www.google.com.au/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9...