Four Henan rural banks froze 40 billion RMB ($6 billion) of retail deposits in April 2022. Chinese homeowners threatened to halt mortgage payments on development project apartments within three months. Though unrelated, many people associate the two events. The mortgage boycott began so soon after the rural banking crisis, which fears about frozen savings may have spurred, and both incidents were disproportionately focused on Henan; this huge, agriculturally important, landlocked province in central China’s
