The most talked-about television programme in China at the moment is a soap opera called Snail House, which offers the viewer sex, corruption and political intrigue. Really, however, it is all about house prices.

One character becomes the mistress of a party official to help her buy a flat, while another young couple struggles unsuccessfully to raise the deposit for an apartment in a city that looks suspiciously like Shanghai. The series struck such a raw nerve that the censors took it off the air at the end of last year, although that has not stopped it becoming a big online hit.

The success of Snail House says something important about the popular mood in China today. While much of the rest of the world is in awe of China's rapid recovery, the programme tapped into the mounting wave of unease about the sky-rocketing cost of apartments in many cities. Urban Chinese complain loudly about becoming “mortgage slaves”.

The house-price angst is fuelling fears among investors that China's super-charged lending boom last year is stoking a real estate bubble that will eventually burst and derail the economy.

Indeed, there is a whiff of Dubai about the Chinese property market at the moment. In Tianjin, a city two hours from Beijing, a developer is starting work on a vast project of luxury villas, built in clusters named after continents, which form the shape of a world map. If that does not sound familiar, nothing screams Dubai more than the 7-star hotel and indoor ski slope that are also part of the plans. (In defence of the skiing, it was -11°C in Tianjin yesterday, compared to Dubai's 23°C.)

There are plenty of alarming statistics to back up the anecdotes. According to Knight Frank, average prices for new homes in the year to November rose by 68 per cent in Shanghai, 66 per cent in Beijing and 51 per cent in Shenzhen. The China Daily noted this week that in terms of house prices as a proportion of incomes, China is now the most expensive place in the world.

That said, anyone predicting problems in Chinese property needs to consider some pretty strong fundamentals underpinning the market. In recent years, incomes have mostly risen faster than house prices, and homeowner debt levels are low.

Then there is urbanisation. According to the State Council, as many as 400m people could move to cities over the next two decades – which works out, by the way, at 322 Dubais. It is hard to lose too much sleep, say the optimists, about a collapse in a property market facing that sort of potential demand.

But there is one factor that makes even property bulls pause for thought: the acres of empty flats in high-end compounds in many Chinese cities. Patrick Chovanec, an economist at Tsinghua University in Beijing, who bought an apartment in a new complex that was sold out but mostly empty, calls them “ghost-condos”. In the Pudong area of Shanghai in the evening there are whole blocks with almost no lights on. By one estimate, 587m sq m of apartments have been left empty by owners.

The reason, says Mr Chovanec, is that Chinese treat flats as “stores of value, like gold”. With few other investment options in a closed economy, they put a big chunk of savings into real estate. And it is this behaviour that is driving up house prices in plenty of cities and, if unchecked, could create a nasty bubble.

China needs not only to rebalance its economy, it also needs to rebalance its housing market, changing the incentives so that the investment goes into much-needed low-income housing and not to high-end flats that are unused. But this is where the politics get difficult.