It’s been pretty much party line that they want this to happen for some time now. Pooh bear famously made this houses are for living in speech and directly wanted to knock out speculation. They do not want to be the West and define themselves by asset prices rising with no relationship to productivity. What the West would view as a major crisis then is the CCP’s intended effect. They specifically targeted these highly leveraged developers with the theory (correct in my opinion) that the loans themselves are what are driving this “growth” and it’s largely creating a situation of extraction that’s pricing out regular Chinese from housing. Even making noises in that direction would seriously spook Western housing prices. Harris’s solution was famously increasing lending if you remember.