Recently, some Koreans have complained that Chinese people from overseas are buying a lot of land and properties in Korea. The increasing number of Chinese people purchasing properties in Korea is causing real estate market instability.
In fact, there has been an increasing number of Chinese landowners in Korea. The number of Chinese landowners has increased by a factor of 14 times in 8 years.
In total land area, Chinese people own land that is six times larger than Yeouido.
Shin Kyo Eon, a real estate professor at Konkuk University, stated, "The problem is that the purchasing rate has increased. There is a lot of concerns that housing prices in certain areas are soaring. There needs to be measures taken against foreigners buying property and land."
Critics point out that the proportion of Chinese people among all foreign landowners has increased vastly. Currently, political circles have begun to push for a bill that could partially restrict foreign real estate purchases in Korea. There has even been a petition given to the presidential office at the Blue House about this matter.
According to the bill obtained by Korea Economic TV, Article 7 of the Real Estate Transaction Reporting Act itself is set as a presidential decree.
Previously, the acquisition of 'land' by foreigners could be restricted under the current law, but it was not included in the Presidential Decree in accordance with the reciprocity between countries. Mutualism is a diplomatic term that takes the same action between countries; however, Korean citizens cannot own land in China.
Hong Seok Joon, a member of the National Assembly of the People's Power, stated, "The Chinese landowners can greatly affect the housing prices. In actuality, there are no regulations on owning foreign real estate. In International Law, the greatest principle is reciprocity. However, there is an indefinite concept of ownership when it comes to the Chinese people."
Rep. Hong also plans to apply the same level of regulations to the real estate transactions of foreigners as the Korean people in the domestic real estate transactions.
The plan is to expand the land transaction permit system, which limits the sale to foreigners if they do not actually live in the property, and impose an additional heavy tax rate on the current acquisition tax rate when foreigners purchase houses.
Rep. Hong Seok Joon stated, "There is a need to change the law so that we can regulate transactions from land to apartments and houses. There's no need to discriminate against people overseas to those in Korea. However, currently, the housing laws are structured to benefit foreigners much more than Koreans in Korea."
Due to the government's strict regulations on real estate, the dream of owning a home for many Koreans is becoming unreachable.
The measure to prevent foreigners from acquiring speculative properties is likely to be put on the back burner, but this will spread controversy over discrimination among Koreans.
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To further explain why this is happening without the more racist and xenophobic comments that usually get thrown in by the less informed you have to understand what is driving this phenomena.
Over the last 20 years a lot of Chinese people got wealthy due to the CCP opening up the economy to a more capitalistic system, however China is still a communist country which means it's structure is overall still anticapitalistic in nature and one of the less spoken about instances of this is land ownership.
In China the state owns all the land so as a private citizen all you get to do if you want a home is lease it for a set amount of time, you don't own it as an asset and you can't pass that asset on to your children after you die.
Because home ownership is treated differently in Western countries where you do get to own your own home and can pass it onto your children plus our more stable laws and banking system has incentified the newly wealthy citizens of China to park that capital outside of China, this also had the additional benefit of keeping the CCP from arbitrarily stealing their money and this is why we have had a mass exodus of Chinese millionaires moving to Western countries.
The downside for those countries is that this new demand drives up housing prices to the point where the local inhabitants can no longer afford housing and a lot of these properties are also left vacant which can effect local community cohesion and local economies.
This is a separate issue to CCP backed companies buying up Western assets and infrastructure as a matter of state control over those assets for influence but unfortunately the two issues get conflated together.
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