Borrow-to-build model’s limits The current property crisis is a problem of the government’s own making. Regulators allowed developers to gorge themselves on debt to finance a growth-at-all-costs strategy for decades. Then they intervened suddenly and drastically in 2020 to prevent a housing bubble. They stopped the flow of cheap money to China’s biggest real estate companies, leaving many short on cash. One after another, the companies began to crumble as they could not pay their bills. More than 50 Chinese property developers have defaulted or failed to make debt payments in the past three years, according to credit ratings agency…