Officials move to tame housing market, but sell land at rising prices, write Xiaoyi Shao and Koh Gui Qing IN DEFYING four years of official cooling efforts, China’s soaring house prices reveal an uncomfortable truth: the government is one of the biggest obstacles to the success of taming the market.State income is so entwined in the need for rising land prices that policy efforts to try to curb the housing market create an inherent conflict of interest.With one hand on a patchwork of controls aimed at taming record house prices, local governments with their other hand are at the same time selling land to developers at rising prices.Homes in cities such as Beijing are more expensive by some measures than in the UK or Japan, a dismal outcome for a central government campaign aimed at making homes more affordable. House prices nationwide rose at their fastest pace in three years in September.Selling land is a major source of income for local governments but other factors drive up price...
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