China Mortgage Boycott Data Erased by Censors as Crisis Spreads
- Shared documents, social media posts are being scrubbed online
- Github remains as a source for mortgage boycott data sharing
Unfinished apartment buildings at a residential project, in Shanghai.
Photographer: Qilai Shen/BloombergThis article is for subscribers only.
China is censoring crowd-sourced documents tallying the number of mortgage boycotts spreading across the country, potentially hampering a key source of data for global investors and researchers tracking the property crisis.
Shared files managed on platforms including China’s Quora-equivalent Zhihu Inc. and on sites like Kdocs and Wolai have been banned following reports that the number of homebuyers refusing to pay mortgages surged in a span of days. GitHub, a popular file-sharing site for coders, remains as a source for people to post documents.