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@tillshadeisgone @sapphicseagoat I don't know much about where does this rate come from.
But I'm originally from ex-Soviet Russia (you mentioned that I'm European in your previous reply, but I lived all my life there, only having moved to Germany a few years ago), which has similar homeownership rate; as in "90% of people own _a_ housing", not "90% of people own the housing they live in".
Technically, I was a homeowner since birth, and almost everybody I knew were too. That's just because in USSR, everybody in the cities were "renting" from the government, and in early 90s, this rent was converted into homeownership for all tenants. Like, a large family lives in a tiny single room apartment in a delapidated building in a small town? Everybody, even the toddlers, own a tiny piece of it now! Maybe it was good in 90s; but it doesn't help much now in 2020s when there is no work in this town and the real estate in this town is almost worthless, and the real estate in the cities is super expensive. But on paper everybody is a homeowner, yes.
I'm not saying that the situation is the same in China, just that high rate of homeownership by itself doesn't have the same meaning in countries like Russia or China as it would in the US. (And a while ago I've seen many similar posts from the people on the West saying how regular people have good lives in Russia, while regular people in Russia absolutely Did Not; and this, I know first-hand.)

And apparently when one measures homeownership rates in cities like Shanghai, the results are entirely different, with a huge generational gap: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-024-03793-w
The exorbitant prices of housing in major cities in China are a very well known problem (and acknowledged by the government afaik), exorbitant to the degree when for a regular worker who doesn't own a housing they can sell or mortgage and rent out already, buying a housing is literally impossible.
I'm sure that there are many videos from people who are renting in cities like Shanghai, telling how much is the rent :)