Page - 183 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

183 #Hallstatt financial crisis. But all in all, we spend every single day in a state of anxiety and I’m not exempt from it. (ibid.) Is this to be our future? What can one do in the face of fear- generating hyperobjects like China and climate change? How to prevent fear from making things worse? What can one under- stand that will make a difference? A key difference between the two Hallstatts is that the Chi- nese one is surrounded by a massive property development. Piecing the case studies in this book together encourages us to see the way the Chinese state has used property as a form of al- ternative currency. As Wade Shepard’s work draws attention to, “The first thing to understand is that nobody in China actually owns property. Land is still nationalised, and leases are sold for up to as many as 70 years” (Hatherley 2015; italics added). Chi- nese have been encouraged to invest in property, and not GICs or gold, not as places to live but in order to provide for their own individual prosperity. What else it is important to understand is the scope and the significance of these developments: In 2009, fully 45 percent of China’s population, or about 570 million people, were estimated to be living in urban areas. [… B] y the end of 2005, 80 percent of urban Chinese owned their homes. […] Even amid the turmoil that struck the in- ternational financial markets in 2008, government statistics indicate China’s residential property sales jumped around 80 percept to approximately 3.8 trillion RMB in 2009, as indi- vidual home mortgage lending rose nearly 50 percent over the previous year. (Bosker 2013, 4–5)16 16 In its scope, this phenomenon resembles the new financial regime in the us that Saskia Sassen has described as “a kind of Frankenstein of a special kind: it can never lose” (Sassen 2019). Where it differs from the Chinese is that while the Chinese system concentrates on circulation, the us system is purely extractive, as one sees in the example Sassen gives of their “suc- ceeding in passing a law in Congress that establishes this [student debt] is a debt than can never be excused. So there is a capability at work here that the traditional bank never had. I am not saying debt is a new phenom-