China's national real estate registration network, which is to provide information on the ownership of every property in 40 major cities, is seven months past its deadline, leading observers to speculate that the process is being obstructed by government officials who fear their hidden wealth will be made public.
Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development (MOHURD) was ordered by the State Council in 2010 to set up a national property database linking many existing databases from 40 municipalities and cities by June 30, 2012.
An anonymous source close to MOHURD told the Global Times Sunday that the network is now a "sensitive" topic in the ministry.
Ma Guangyuan, a well-known commentator, was quoted by caijing.com.cn as saying the big obstacle is that some officials fear being targeted for a corruption investigation if they disclose their ownership of multiple properties.
Xue Jianxiong, a senior real estate analyst with E-House China, told the Global Times that a lack of appropriate policies and complicated historical factors are to blame for missing the deadline.
"It is very difficult to set a national standard to define properties that should be included in the network because there are various types of properties, such as those built before 1949, or privately constructed ones," he said, adding that household registration and civil affairs agencies are also involved, making it even more complicated.
A technology supervisor surnamed Yu with the Shenzhen-based Chuangsike Technology, a major property information management software provider, told the Global Times Sunday that there should be no "technology barrier" in connecting the municipal databases with a national database.
"The real problem is the standards for data collection are different everywhere," he said.
Zhu Zhongyi, vice director of China Real Estate Association, said the databases from the 40 cities have already been linked but the achievement has not yet been made public, according to a report by the 21st Century Business Herald, which quoted Zhu as saying the ministry expects to expand the national database to include 265 cities this year.
MOHURD website says linking city-level property information systems to the higher level databases is one of its major tasks in 2013.
Its goal is to provide more genuine market data and carry out better policies.
Gong Aiai, a former bank official from a coal town in Shaanxi Province who has four hukou (household registration), was declared by the police to own 41 properties in Beijing and heated up the Internet.
Xue noted that a well-designed national network could help market supervision and regulate the real estate industry, as well as optimize resource distribution.
However, netizens doubt whether a registration system could help supervise corrupt officials, as they can always find ways to evade fully disclosing their real estate assets.