The need to see China fail verges on jingoism. Americans distrust the Chinese model, find that its business practices verge on the immoral and illegal, that its reporting and accounting standards are sub-par at best and that its system is one of crony capitalism run by crony communists. On Wall Street, the presumption usually seems to be that any Chinese company is a ponzi scheme masquerading as a viable business. In various conversations and debates, I have rarely heard China's economic model mentioned without disdain. Take, as just one example, Gordon Chang in Forbes: "Beijing's technocrats can postpone a reckoning, but they have not repealed the laws of economics. There will be a crash."

The consequences of a Chinese collapse, however, would be severe for the United States and for the world. There could be no major Chinese contraction without a concomitant contraction in the United States. That would mean sharply curtailed Chinese purchases of U.S. Treasury bonds, far less revenue for companies like General Motors, Nike, KFC and Apple that have robust business in China (Apple made $6.83 billion in the fourth quarter of 2012, up from $4.08 billion a year prior), and far fewer Chinese imports of high-end goods from American and Asian companies. It would also mean a collapse of Chinese imports of materials such as copper, which would in turn harm economic growth in emerging countries that continue to be a prime market for American, Asian and European goods.

China is now the world's second-largest economy, and property booms have been one aspect of its growth. Individual Chinese cannot invest outside of the country, and the limited options of China's stock exchanges and almost nonexistent bond market mean that if you are middle class and want to do more than keep your money in cash or low-yielding bank accounts, you buy either luxury goods or apartments. That has meant a series of property bubbles over the past decade and a series of measures by state and local officials to contain them. These recent measures are hardly the first, and they are not likely to be the last.

The past 10 years have seen wild swings in property prices, and as recently as 2011 the government took steps to cool them; the number of transactions plummeted and prices slumped in hot markets like Shanghai as much as 30, 40 and even 50 percent. You could go back year by year in the 2000s and see similar bubbles forming and popping, as the government reacted to sharp run-ups with restrictions and then eased them when the pendulum threatened to swing too far.

China has had a series of property bubbles and a series of property busts. It has also had massive urbanization that in time has absorbed the excess supply generated by massive development. Today much of that supply is priced far above what workers flooding into China's cities can afford. But that has always been true, and that housing has in time been purchased and used by Chinese families who are moving up the income spectrum, much as U.S. suburbs evolved in the second half of the 20th century.