The influential short-seller is betting that China's economy is about to implode in a spectacular real estate bust. A lot of people are hoping that Chanos - who called Enron right - is wrong this time.

    The scene is a cocktail party high above the Shanghai skyline on a summer night a few months ago. Our host is a Master of the Hedge Fund Universe, one who doesn't want to be identified in the press. We'll call him Pete. Pete comes to China at least twice a year to stay abreast of what's happening in the world's most dynamic economy. He has said, in fact, that if he didn't have kids in school in the U.S., he would consider moving here, so bright is the future. In attendance are other hedge fund investors, venture capitalists, and fund managers, China bulls all. If there is one sure-fire way to ruin the atmosphere on such a pleasant evening, it is this: Ask the crowd what they think of the legendary short-seller James Chanos, CEO of Manhattan-based Kynikos Associates.

    So that's what I do.

    "Hey," I say to a cluster of people surrounding Pete. "Did you guys see what Jim Chanos said about China on Charlie Rose the other night?"

    "No," says an American venture capitalist working in Shanghai. "What did he say?"

    "He said, 'China's on an economic treadmill to hell.' "

    For over a year now Chanos -- the man who got Enron (among other things) right before anyone else -- has been on a rampage about China. The guy who became famous -- and rich -- shorting companies now says he is shorting the entire country.

    When I mention the "treadmill to hell" line to the group in Shanghai, the reaction is the usual one when Chanos's name comes up here: "What does he know about China?" the American VC asks. "Has he ever lived here? Does he have staff here? Does he speak Chinese?"

    The answers are no, no, and no. But our host, who counts Chanos as a friend, knows that is not the point. "He did get Enron right," Pete says. "And Tyco. And the whole mortgage bust." He concludes: "Look, he may be wrong, but you need to tell me why he's wrong, not point out that he doesn't live here."

    Chanos smiles when I relate the story to him on a recent morning in New York. He knows what a lightning rod he has become. "The only time I have ever been heckled giving an investment presentation was earlier this year at Oxford," he says. "Some Chinese graduate students got so annoyed with me that they started to shout me down, saying the same sort of stuff: 'What do you know about China? How dare you say such things!' "

    It's not, of course, just young Chinese people who get worked up on the subject. What Fortune Global 500 company isn't betting that China is the future? For many companies, the possibility that Jim Chanos could be right, that there could be a U.S.-or-Japanese-style bust in China, is beyond scary. It's unthinkable.

Something unprecedented

    How did Chanos come to his China obsession? It started in 2009, when he and his team at Kynikos looked at commodity prices and the stocks of big mining companies. "Everything we did in our microwork [on commodities] kept leading us back to China's property market," Chanos says. China's construction boom was driving demand for nearly every basic material.

    One day, at a research conference in 2009, Chanos listened to an analyst tick off numbers about the scale of China's building boom. "He said they were building 5 billion square meters of new residential and office space -- 2.6 billion square meters in new office space alone. I said to him, 'You must have the decimal point in the wrong place.' He said no, the numbers are right. So do the math: That's almost 30 billion square feet of new construction. There are 1.3 billion people in China. [In terms of new office space alone] that amounts to about a five-by-five-foot cubicle for every man, woman, and child in the country. That's when it dawned on me that China was embarking on something unprecedented.''

    Kynikos didn't post anyone in China. Analysts make occasional research trips, though Chanos himself does not. Given his reputation there, he says, "it's probably best that I don't go. I can just see the New York Post headline: NEW YORK INVESTOR KILLED IN MYSTERIOUS ONE-MAN EARTHQUAKE."

    Chanos says that underlying his firm's analysis are data the Chinese government itself reports publicly, such as numbers from the Bureau of Statistics and the National Development and Reconstruction Commission, the country's most powerful economics ministry. In the past year, he says, his team has developed a "proprietary database" that tracks real estate sales in China. "We are not fudging data or just hearing or seeing what we want to hear and see," he insists. And he has a standard retort to those who say you can't know China because you don't live there: "I didn't work at Enron either."

So many empty properties

    To understand Chanos's China skepticism -- he calls it "Dubai times 1,000" -- it's worth visiting the Rose and Ginko Valley housing development near Sheshan Mountain, a new suburb outside Shanghai. Block after block after block of villas have gone up. And they are empty.

    In the country's largest, most affluent cities -- Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen, known as tier-one cities to the real estate cognoscenti -- it is not an unusual phenomenon. There is a lot of new, unoccupied housing in China. Just how much -- and just how much of a concern it should be -- is a central debate.

    Fixed-asset investment accounts for more than 60% of China's overall GDP. No other major economy even comes close. And of that fixed investment, slightly less than a quarter is attributable to new real estate investment.

    There are reliable data on the amount of new construction under way each year, and on how much is sold. In 2009, for instance, buyers in China purchased 44% more residential floor space than they did in 2008.

    But there are no official estimates yet for the vacancy rates for private housing, for how much of that new housing bought is actually occupied. (The government, signaling that it understands how much it matters, is carrying out a census now to try to get a grip on the question.)

    Consider the Sheshan project. A spokesman for the Chongqing-based development company would say only that almost all the units were sold in advance. That, in fact, has been standard-operating procedure in the market for new housing in China. Buyers plunk down money based on a plan, and the developer takes those commitments to the bank to get financing for construction. Very few projects are done on spec.

    But that still leaves the question that makes a lot of people nervous -- and Chanos bearish -- about China: Why are so many flats and villas that have been bought and paid for empty? And how could that augur anything but pain for the real estate market in China? And if it means pain for the real estate market, considering that new property sales accounted for 14% of GDP in 2009, doesn't that mean trouble, sooner or later, for the broader economy?

    That the real estate market in China is hugely speculative is not in dispute. An investor who lives near me in suburban Shanghai has bought -- count 'em -- 43 units over the past three years. He is still sitting on them, because, he believes, prices will continue going up.

    Chanos ticks off reasons for that kind of behavior. Individual Chinese investors are limited in where they can put their renminbi. They can stash it in a standard bank account and receive a negative rate of return, given an inflation rate running at about 3%. They can put the money in the stock market, but equities in China are much more volatile than those in developed markets. Capital controls limit investment opportunities for individuals abroad. So that leaves real estate.

    Chanos acknowledges that China's emerging middle class sees real estate as a store of value. To many, buying an apartment in Shanghai or Beijing is like buying a bar of gold. And many -- "too many," Chanos says -- have kept on buying as prices have gone up in the past five years.

    Chanos's team, like a lot of other people, is trying to get a grip on just how many empty units there are in China. One prominent bear in China, independent economist Andy Xie, has put the amount at the equivalent of 15% of GDP. Chanos doesn't endorse that specific figure but believes "it's a big problem, and it's getting worse, not better, as more units come onstream."