Yanjiao, Hebei Province: Piao Zhihua arrived in Beijing in 2008 as a fresh-faced university graduate from north-eastern Heilongjiang province, her modest aspirations instantly augmented by the infectious euphoria sweeping the Chinese capital during its Olympics year.

Piao's Chinese dream was almost a universal one. She would work hard, she thought. Pinch and save, scrape together a deposit for an apartment. Maybe eventually marry and settle down, travel and see the world.

Now 31, the brutal reality of Piao's circumstances is that eight years on, she is further away from home ownership than when she began.

"The rate at which my salary grows can never catch up to the speed at which house prices are increasing," she says. "When I see the stark reality of those figures, there really is a sense of disappointment, a sense of hopelessness."

A relentless explosion in housing costs in an increasingly crowded Beijing has seen her pushed out to the city's fringes, where she rents an apartment in the satellite town of Yanjiao, some 35 kilometres east of central Beijing.

Technically across the border in neighbouring Hebei province, banks of high-rise apartments have sprouted in Yanjiao to cater for migrant workers who go home at night only to rest their heads. Piao has grown accustomed to spending as much as four hours a day commuting through Beijing's notoriously snarly peak-hour traffic to get to and from town, where she works in accounts at an interior design company.

After a relative lull last year, house prices across major Chinese cities such as Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen have experienced tearaway growth of some 30 to 40 per cent in 2016, despite already boasting the world's most expensive homes on a price-to-income basis.

In China, real estate prices are typically quoted on a per square-metre basis. Prices in central Beijing conservatively start at 80,000 yuan [about $16,000] per square metre, making even a nondescript, 100-square-metre, two-bedroom, previously owned apartment $1.6 million. New off-the-plan apartments within the city's fourth ring road sold in August for an average 15 million yuan, or close to $3 million, according to Chinese media reports. Across the country, prices rose in 64 of 70 major cities that month, according to official government data.

That heady growth has prompted warnings of a rapidly reinflating property price bubble from the central bank, senior Bank of China economists, and China's richest man, property tycoon Wang Jianlin.

Those fears go some way towards explaining why Chinese buyers have been snapping up real estate overseas, from New York to Vancouver, and from Sydney to Melbourne.

But the vast majority of domestic buyers appear undeterred; if anything, the price gains have become something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Like the frenzied stockmarket buying last year which ultimately ended in tears, fear of missing out has provided strong motivation for cashed-up property speculators, as well as genuine investors and owner-occupiers worried they will soon be priced out altogether if they don't act fast. Constant speculation that provincial governments are on the cusp of introducing new purchasing restrictions to prevent the market from overheating has only exacerbated the buying craze.

Eyebrow-raising property stories are a mainstay of the Chinese media cycle, from couples in Nanjing filing for divorce to circumvent buying restrictions limiting the number of properties married couples can buy, to prospective buyers who thought they had negotiated a deal only to return later that day to find the asking price had shot up by double-digit percentage points.

In Hangzhou, surveillance footage of desperate homebuyers trampling over each other, breaking down a set of doors in the process, swiftly went viral. The mad crush was prompted by an effort to get in ahead of new restrictions taking effect that would ban those born outside the city from buying more than one property.

In Shenzhen, a manufacturing and tech hub in southern China, social media users were in uproar over the sale of outrageously expensive "micro-apartments". The six-square-metre "pigeon cage" apartments were snapped up swiftly, despite the price tag of 880,000 yuan being roughly 20 times the city's average annual per capita income.

China's economic policymakers have long grappled with maintaining a property market that was neither too hot or too cold, using purchasing restrictions, interest rates and monetary stimulus as levers to control prices. But with economic growth slowing, the temptation to allow bustling housing activity to buttress gross domestic product has proven hard to resist.

The problem, however, is that even average properties in major cities are far out of the reach of ordinary workers. In first-tier cities like Beijing, home ownership for ordinary young workers is near impossible without help from parents, or unless their family got in early and already owns real estate.

China's economic miracle in recent decades has thrived on the enterprise of hundreds of millions seizing the opportunity to achieve living standards that previous generations could never have imagined. But as that momentum recedes, entire generations risk being alienated.

"For young people, your life has been stolen from you, your dreams extinguished," says Lu Hanshuo, a popular financial blogger. "The reality of high house prices tells you that Chinese society is about who your parents are; what is the use of fighting, of working hard? You could work hard for a lifetime, but in large cities like Beijing, Shanghai or Guangzhou, you can barely afford to buy a toilet."

Home ownership is particularly integral to the Chinese family unit, especially when there is no robust social safety net. It is still common for romances to end and weddings to be called off if the man cannot provide for a home.

As a real estate agent, 28-year-old Shen Kun has already made peace with the idea that he will likely never afford a house in Beijing.

"I haven't started a family, but will soon. It's because Beijing's house prices are too high, I can't afford it," says Shen, who first arrived in Beijing 13 years ago to study and now shares a rented apartment with his girlfriend.

"For those of us born in the 1980s, from ordinary family backgrounds, it's not realistic. Those who are able to own homes in Beijing, they're either native to Beijing, or they're successful entrepreneurs from other cities. They may own four or five properties each."

Shen says he isn't resentful that a young person's ability to buy a home is predetermined by which family they are born into, rather than how hard they choose to work. He denies that circumstances have beaten the ambition out of him, insisting that he is merely being realistic about what he can achieve financially.

"I don't need to compare with others. You give me a bed to sleep on and a bathroom where I can shower, that's enough," he says. "The more you dream, the more you hope ... well, how exactly are you going to achieve them?

"I believe people are born unequal. Look at my parents, for example. Even if you take the money they've made over a lifetime, it's not enough to buy even a bathroom in Beijing."

Shen plans to eventually return to his home town, the steel factory town of Baotou in Inner Mongolia, to buy an apartment. But for many migrant workers who leave small towns and villages across the mainland to try and make it in the nation's capital, returning home is to admit defeat.

"My home town can't give me what I want in life," Piao says. "But Chinese people traditionally place a lot of importance on owning a home. My father often tells me, buy a house for stability, to settle down. I say, 'I'm working hard on it, just you wait'."

With Sanghee Liu