Sinocism: "Beijing for Beijingers?"

Sinocism (a.k.a. Niubi on Twitter) has a post on his blog that sums up the potential ramifications of Beijing's new car and real estate regulations restricting the ability of the capital's non-native Beijinger residents to buy property and limiting native Beijingers to owning just two properties, among other rules.

"Expect a cottage industry to develop around fake divorces, fake marriages to poor Beijing residents, and 'renting' of Beijing residents’ identity cards to allow people to exploit loopholes and buy property," he writes, while pointing out that the current one-home buying restrictions on foreigners with Z-visas remains unchanged.

Like their Chinese waidiren (外地人, 'provincial') counterparts, many foreigners who don't own apartments (i.e. the vast majority in Beijing) are similarly screwed - rents have been going up (some by as much as 40%, according to a few unlucky friends) and quite a number of people are being forced to move as a result. On top of that, Sinocism predicts a rise in commercial real estate prices as developers (and commercial property owners) looks to "hedge their bets ... in these inflationary and uncertain times" - more bad news if you're renting office space (as in our case).

But the biggest losers in this equation remain Beijing's swelling population of waidiren as access to decent housing, transportation, health and education become increasingly out of reach. "Beijing has explicitly reiterated that non-Beijingers are second-class citizens," he writes, and sardonically jokes how the capital "is now so prosperous that you are not allowed to buy cars or real estate."

We may be just a quarter of the way into 2011, but this is already shaping up to be a most interesting year.

Check out the rest of Sinocism's post here.