Marco Castelli is locked up.

In China again.

The Italian businessman, who runs a small shop on Shanghai's Anfu Street, has to stay at home for two days - because one of the residents in the building has been classified by the Chinese health authorities as "contact of a contact" with a person infected with Covid.

The lockdown is nothing new for Castelli.

It is the second time he has been placed under house arrest in three weeks.

Just like millions of others in China.

Opposite Castelli's fashion store, for example, is the Alimentari restaurant, which is equally popular with foreigners and Chinese.

A few weeks ago, buses picked up all the employees there and drove them to a quarantine camp.

But now the zero-Covid spook should be over in the Middle Kingdom - at least if you believe the financial markets.

The MSCI China index has risen by a good 19 percent since the beginning of the month.

Investors' optimism is fueled almost exclusively by the hope that President Xi Jinping's radical zero-Covid policy will soon come to an end.

This has also given Hong Kong's Hang Seng Index a fifth gain in value in two weeks.

Investors felt vindicated when Beijing's National Health Commission unveiled 20 measures to "tweak" the zero-Covid policy on Friday.

From now on, only those who have had direct contact with a person infected with Covid should be in quarantine.

Travelers only have to isolate themselves in a government hotel or a central warehouse for 5 days instead of 7.

Since reports circulated over the weekend that Beijing not only wanted to abolish the dreaded lockdowns, but also wanted to rebuild the ailing housing market with all sorts of new loans for highly indebted real estate developers, their share prices have skyrocketed.

The price of a Country Garden share, measured by sales by the country's largest homebuilder, rose more than 45 percent on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on Monday alone.

Chinese and foreign media reported over the weekend that China's central bank and banking regulators had presented a 16-point plan to ensure the "stable and healthy development" of the real estate industry.

This would include the possibility for the housing construction groups to extend bank loans that are due to expire in the next six months by a year.

The due date of bond interest could therefore be pushed back.

The bank UBS wrote in an analysis on Monday that this has a favorable effect on the cash flow of the starving developers.

A year ago, the central government had turned off the credit faucet to the very often extremely highly indebted corporations, which had caused housing builders like Evergrande to face considerable liquidity problems.

As a result, the cranes stood still on many construction sites.

Apartments that the buyers had already partially paid for were not finished.

That, in turn, has sparked a crisis of confidence among Chinese, with home sales plummeting to 80 percent of pre-pandemic 2019 levels.

Now the developers are apparently to be given fresh money to be able to finish building the apartments in order to restore public confidence and stabilize prices.

For the real estate industry, which is very important in China and which, depending on the calculation, accounts for up to a third of the entire economic output, this is a "turning point", wrote UBS.

Just a "turn"

But is that really the case?

Far from all observers believe that China's leadership is now suddenly making a U-turn in two of its most important political decisions in recent years.

After all, the party congress, where President Xi Jinping cemented his power for possibly decades, sent the opposite signal: continuity instead of change.

And so the easing of the Covid policy and in the real estate industry are also "positive", writes the Beijing analysis house Gavekal Dragonomics.

But they are "not the dramatic changes" that some would have hoped for: With the new regulations, the government is trying to "improve its current approach to containing Covid and to the housing market" instead of giving it up.

Just as the Shanghai businessman Castelli was illegally imprisoned as a second contact at the weekend, contrary to the new rules, the analysts at Gavekal Dragonomics also have serious doubts as to whether Beijing actually wants to relax its zero-Covid policy at a time when the number of cases is rising sharply.

The impression that China is moving away from putting entire cities under lockdown is wrong.

And because those entering the country will now have to spend another three days in house arrest after the five days in centralized quarantine, the number of quarantine days will ultimately increase from seven to eight.

According to Gavekal Dragnomics, Beijing will also stick to its hard line towards the indebted real estate companies.

The package of measures, which has not been publicly presented, is not a central government-led rescue of ailing home builders like Evergrande.

It will be "some time" before the crisis of confidence among homebuyers subsides.

Previous "well-intentioned" policy interventions have shown that they failed to boost the economy.

Instead of 16-point plans and cloudy announcements, only concrete signals are decisive for the hope of a revitalization of the Chinese economy: the development of new vaccines, a widespread vaccination campaign among the population and an increase in lending and house sales.