“There is enough empty property in China to house over 90m people, says Logan Wright, a Hong Kong-based director at Rhodium Group, a consultancy. To put that into perspective: there are five G7 countries — France, Germany, Italy, the UK and Canada — that could each fit their entire population into those empty Chinese apartments with room to spare… The Chinese state owns almost all of the country’s large financial institutions , meaning that if Beijing orders them to bail out Evergrande or other distressed property companies, they will follow orders “Unless China’s regulators seriously mismanage the situation, a systemic crisis in the country’s financial sector is not on the cards,” says He Wei, an analyst at Gavekal, a research company. “The context of the Evergrande crisis is entirely different from Lehman Bros in 2008. Most obviously, Lehman operated in a free market; Evergrande does not. Lehman’s fate was sealed when banks would no longer lend to it. The bulk of Evergrande’s liabili