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What you need to know:Why Are People Across China Refusing to Pay Their Mortgages? What to Know So Far
Wealth

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.

Unfinished apartment buildings at a residential project, in Shanghai.

Photographer: Qilai Shen/Bloomberg
By
Bloomberg News

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.