Photo by Marcus Urbenz on Unsplash
I listened to a podcast today about shifting attitudes toward real estate among young people in China. The host kept contrasting “pre-pandemic” and “post-pandemic.” This is a case where imprecise language produces imprecise thinking, which then produces the wrong conclusion. The error begins with the terminology itself.
The podcast uses “pandemic” to refer to the entire period from early 2020 to late 2022. But the pandemic was simply the global spread of a virus — a universal event. What affected China most was not the pandemic but the three years of COVID controls — lockdowns, movement restrictions, and zero-COVID enforcement — which were specific to China.
Once you collapse these policies into “the pandemic,” the analytical focus shifts from human choices to a biological event. You start attributing social change to “the virus,” instead of examining how prolonged controls and uncertainty reshaped the economy and people’s sense of security. A misidentified starting point yields a misidentified conclusion.
If everything is attributed to “the pandemic,” you cannot explain why the entire world experienced COVID-19, yet China’s social shifts — including attitudes toward housing — were uniquely pronounced. The actual driver was the instability of income expectations and the loss of security created by the policy response.
That is why I call those years the three years of COVID controls. This is not pedantry. It protects the analytical starting point: precise language → precise thinking → correctable conclusions.