Ren Xingzhou, the head of the Research Institute of Market Economy under the State Council's Development Research Center, said recently that every Chinese household has 1.02 apartments on average, a figure which would suggest that China's housing shortage is not as dire as many have argued.

This statistic syncs up with data released at last year's two sessions which put per capita urban housing at 32.9 square meters. If one assumes that an average household has three persons and an average apartment is 90 square meters, these figures all appear to fit together quite nicely.

But at the same time though, it's still anyone's guess as to how well these numbers represent the actually living situation of your typical Chinese urbanite given the yawning gap which separates the country's haves and have-nots. For every person like Gong Aiai, the former banker from Shaanxi Province who was found owning 9,666.9 square meters of property across 41 apartment units in Beijing, there could be 300 homeless people living on the streets.

The author is Yin Guo'an, a commentator.