Chinese people welcomed in the year of the rabbit this year visiting family, playing mah-jong, betting on the horses (among other things) and inspecting the latest flats for sale.

Buying property has become a national passion in China. Last week, Beijing announced further measures in its ongoing campaign to cool both demand for property and real estate prices. It raised interest rates in an effort to induce people to keep money in the banks. It adjusted the way the property price index is calculated in much the same way it earlier adjusted the consumer price index to minimise the impact of rising food prices on inflation. It told foreigners that unless they had paid taxes for a number of years in a given city, they would be unable to buy property.

In spite of these efforts, though, the betting on the mainland is that the game will continue. Virtually nobody in China thinks there is any chance of a crash in the property market, for a mix of fundamental and self-interested reasons. For one thing, there is a lot of vested interests in the government itself that have a stake in rising prices. Most local government revenue comes from land sales. If land prices fall, governments take in less money. So while Beijing announces the latest edicts in a loud voice, local governments undermine that policy in whispers.

The bankers, too, prefer to ignore Beijing’s wishes. The banks are run by bureaucrats who are all party members and serve at the behest of the regulators. But beneath the senior echelons of the banks are staffers who wish to expand their loan books and circumvent restrictions on loan growth.

Evasive measures were successful last year, when loan growth exceeded official targets by a wide margin. This year the voices from Beijing have become more insistent so mainland bankers are referring clients to their Hong Kong offices for arrangements to get around inconvenient limitations on the mainland and keep the money flowing.

There are other factors as well. Interest rates remain deeply negative in real terms. Everyone in China is looking for alternatives between the gambling tables of Macau and receiving half a percentage point of interest on deposits from their (unfriendly) local bank.

Today, these people can put their money out through private channels for more generous returns. For the first time there is a class of wealthy entrepreneurs with enough scale that they have become a significant source of funding, particularly for property. Developers in China cannot get loans to actually acquire land. They can only borrow after they have secured the land. That does not matter much for the larger developers that are listed and cash rich, but it does give rise to an irritating sequence problem for those developers that are not. The problem is solved by introducing developers to well-heeled entrepreneurs who are the clients of the wealth-management arms of the banks.

Developers often sell shares of the unit that is responsible for a given property project to entrepreneurs via these bank networks, paying them between 10 per cent and 13 per cent a year for the money. In other cases, entrepreneurs themselves form underground banks in search of lucrative projects.

Of course, the self-interest of developers and banks does not mean there will not be a crash, just that people want to make money from property. More important from a fundamental viewpoint is the fact that the Chinese market lacks the classic symptoms of a bubble today. One of the reasons why the US and Japanese housing booms were so fragile was the extent to which those booms were financed with borrowed money. If leverage is one of the key worrying signs, there is not much of it in China right now, either at the level of builder or buyer.