Over the years, state control of China’s economy has alternately fuelled both a stock-market bubble and a real-estate one; there are signs that the latter is bloating once again. Photograph by Liu jiang / Imaginechina via AP

At China’s most important political forum of the year—a joint session of the National People’s Congress and the People’s Political Consultative Conference, which concluded yesterday—the talk has been heavy on economics. And for good reason. Since a spectacular plunge in the Shanghai Stock Exchange last June, China’s economy, the world’s second largest after that of the United States, has sunk into its steepest slowdown in a quarter century. “Domestically, problems and risks that have been building up over the years are becoming more evident,” Premier Li Keqiang, the nation’s top economic official, told the three thousand delegates sombrely gathered at the People’s Great Hall last Saturday. This was a departure from the regime’s usual rote assurances that the economy will continue to grow at a strong pace. Acknowledging an economic downturn may be uncomfortable for an authoritarian regime that has long prided itself on its stewardship of the socialist economic engine. But, for a generation of Chinese reared on the rhetoric of a relentless and freewheeling economic ascent, it is terrifying.

One expression of Beijing’s obsessive attempts to control the economy is the way it has alternately fuelled both a stock-market bubble and a real-estate one. Over the years, the government has actively steered investors between those markets. In the early nineties, many Chinese, habituated to saving due to the lack of a state social-security system, chose property as their preferred investment vehicle. Deng Xiaoping’s famous Southern Tour, in 1992, in which he publicly touted “aggressive economic development,” inspired a nationwide “development-zone fever”—that is, until the market became saturated, construction halted, and the return on investment dried up. By 2015, the stock market seemed the safer bet. It enjoyed the endorsement of government officials, who, among other things, saw a convenient opportunity to sell off the equity of debt-burdened state-owned enterprises.

But the unnerving burst of the stock-market bubble that year reminded Chinese leaders that their powers had limits. At first, as the market roiled, the government intervened, banning state-owned enterprises from selling off their shares, and buying up hundreds of billions of dollars worth of stocks in an effort to prop up the market. Their reactive measures were meant to stave off short-term pain and chaos, but were hardly an enduring solution. Even as the N.P.C. contemplates fixes for China’s afflicted economy, there are signs that a real-estate bubble is bloating once again, fuelled by monetary stimulus and a loosening of property requirements stipulated by the government.

When I was in Shanghai earlier this month, prospective buyers were lined up for blocks outside property agents’ offices, the lines so long that they blocked traffic. The Party’s official mouthpiece, the Xinhua News Agency, began to warn against “panic” buying, and Shanghai’s municipal government issued a call for cool-headedness on its Weibo microblog account.

Incidentally, another Weibo account has been a flashpoint in the Party’s campaign to better manicure its image. When Ren Zhiqiang, a real-estate tycoon and influential microblogger with thirty-seven million followers, criticized President Xi’s claim that the media’s agenda should always align with that of the Party, his post was immediately deleted and his blog shut down. Three years earlier, Ren had publicly expressed that state manipulation, rather than a market frenzy, was sending real-estate prices to the skies. “As I see it, the government has never thought it had a bubble. If it did, it wouldn’t be this shady. It wouldn’t use such shady land prices to adjust our real estate market,” he wrote. “The government is shadier than property developers.” Censors soon blocked that sentence from Weibo search results.

Eight years ago, at an earlier National People’s Congress, Wen Jiabao, then Prime Minister, remarked that Chinese growth was “unstable, unbalanced, uncoordinated, and unsustainable.” The speech was lauded but largely went unheeded. At the N.P.C. this year, there were calls for shuttering inefficient mills and mines, filling vacant homes in China’s second- and third-tier cities, and letting capital flow more freely across China’s borders. Meanwhile, the gap between official data and market perceptions has widened to a chasm.

In Shanghai, a young man I spoke to, observing the real-estate-office lines, remarked that his hometown had been clutched by a madness. “You would think by the size of these lines that people are waiting for bags of money,” he said. When I asked him if he’d heard about the closing down of the Ren microblog, he seemed unfazed and took a deep pull from his cigarette: “Don’t you know? Nowadays whatever account gets blocked—that’s where the real news is.” More than the economic turmoil, such irreverence and cynicism would likely be the cause of most concern for any member of the National People’s Congress.

“There is no difficulty we cannot get beyond,” Li Keqiang affirmed in his lengthy speech at the National People’s Congress, broadcast on national television. “China is hugely resilient with great potential and ample room for growth.” That may well be true. The Party leadership prizes social stability above all, and will surely do everything it can to avoid a surge in unemployment, which could threaten it. But as China comes of age in all aspects of its development, cracks are emerging that may be beyond the power of state policies to mend. Collective anxieties are mounting at the same time that there is an effort, through mediums such as Weibo, to make the government’s machinations more transparent. At a certain point, as China’s people decide where the real news is, economics won’t be all that matters in the conversation.