It feels like the calm before the storm at the Heavenly Famous Garden housing complex in Tongzhou, a booming commuter town on the outskirts of Beijing. The showroom is empty and for the past two months not a single flat has been sold, yet prices have not budged. Something has to give.

It is situations such as this that are testing the nerve of Chinese authorities as they try gradually to cool an economy that was at risk of overheating earlier in the year.

One of the main tactics has been a campaign to drive speculators out of the property market, which is the reason sales in Tongzhou are frozen.

Efforts to deal with the real estate bubble that developed in some cities are part of a broader push to wean the economy off the massive stimulus of the past year and engineer a soft landing.

Early results of the push were evident this week when growth for the second quarter came in at 10.3 per cent year-on-year, down from 11.9 per cent in the first quarter.

Beijing could still face a delicate dilemma during the next few months. If property prices fall sharply and that leads to a slump in construction, the government will find itself under pressure to reverse course – at the expense of reflating the bubble.

“There is a risk China will pull back on restructuring the economy if policymakers are concerned headline growth will fall too far,” said Brian Jackson at Royal Bank of Canada.

Tongzhou is one of the more extreme examples of the recent property boom. The town, about 20 miles from Beijing, has become a popular option for middle-class families priced out of the capital. The local government has big ambitions – two years ago, it announced plans for a 500-metre tower, which would be 50 per cent bigger than the tallest building in Beijing.

The Heavenly Famous Garden complex shows how quickly the market has run into a wall. Flats next to a new light railway to central Beijing were put on sale last summer and by this April prices had doubled to Rmb24,000 ($3,500, €2,700, £2,300) per square metre. Yet even though a third of the apartments were still unsold, there have been no buyers since the government announced its April clampdown.

One of the country's biggest estate agents, 21st Century, opened an office in Tonghu Avenue in Tongzhou in early May. Since then, it has sold a grand total of one flat, although the list prices on some buildings have slipped 15 per cent.

Even the town planners have had to retreat. The giant tower was reduced in size last month to just 200 metres – so that it did not interfere with air traffic, officials explained.

The Chinese government has been here before. In late 2007 it launched a similar effort to cool the property market, but when the economy started to slow sharply, it reversed course and encouraged people to buy flats.

Paul Cavey, an economist at Macquarie Securities, says that if the government blinks a second time in its efforts to squeeze real estate, it will be setting up its own version of the “Greenspan Put”, a perceived attempt by Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the US Federal Reserve, to prop up the securities markets by lowering interest rates. Chinese investors could come to believe they will never lose money on property because the government will always bail them out. The upshot could be a much bigger bubble in the future.

So far, the national picture shows only a very gradual slowdown. House prices fell 0.1 per cent in June from May, according to government figures on 70 cities across the country, while investment in real estate remains strong.

“There is no basis for them to start relaxing policy now,” says Andy Rothman, an economist at CLSA in Shanghai.

A soft landing for the housing market, and the economy, is the dominant view among economists in China. Beijing would also lose a lot of credibility if it changed strategy so soon. Wen Jiabao, premier, said on Friday there would be “stability and continuity” in economic policy.

The economy could also benefit from Beijing's ambitious new plans to build public housing for low-income families. Designed to shield the working class from the volatility of the market, the programme could provide a backstop for construction, even if the market remains weak.

But as the situation in Tongzhou shows, there could be much steeper price drops ahead – at least in parts of the country. Some influential newspapers are calling for an end to policy tightening. Local governments, which have close and sometimes incestuous ties with the real estate sector, will lobby hard to prevent a big price drop. The politics of China's property market could easily become more treacherous.