Even China’s population of 1.4 billion would not be enough to fill all the empty apartments littered across the country, a former official said on Saturday, in a rare public critique of the country’s crisis-hit property market.
China’s property sector, once the pillar of the economy, has slumped since 2021 when real estate giant China Evergrande Group (3333.HK) defaulted on its debt obligations following a clampdown on new borrowing.
Big-name developers such as Country Garden Holdings (2007.HK) continue to teeter close to default even to this day, keeping home-buyer sentiment depressed.
As of the end of August, the combined floor area of unsold homes stood at 648 million square metres (7 billion square feet), the latest data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) show.
That would be equal to 7.2 million homes, according to Reuters calculations, based on the average home size of 90 square metres.
The world is really lucky that China’s not doing that great at the moment. Not so long ago, China was winning the propaganda war internationally.
You don’t want authoritarianism to win the argument by out-performing democracies.
I agree. I don’t think we had or have anything to fear. The Chinese educational system is built around obedience, cultural homogeneity, and rote learning. Sure, there are fewer protests, and there is less crime, but also a SEVERE lack of innovation. I can count on one hand the number of innovations China has exported to the world in the last decade. Everything they build of note is based on stolen IP and figurative and literal slave labour. The world is finally clamping down on the former, and China’s social progression to a service-based economy is putting an end to the latter. Their comparative competitive advantages are eroding by the day.
and there is less crime
I wouldn’t necessarily bet on this, authoritarian states are breeding grounds for corruption and that in turn fuels crime. I wouldn’t be surprised if China has a problem with criminality that the government, at least on a local level, not only turns a blind eye to but is complicit in.
They’ve hit the middle income trap while simultaneously upsetting all their trading partners. It’s not going to be a pretty fall from grace. Fake numbers saying how awesome things are only work for so long.
I suspect a major reason for Putin’s most recent crimes was to prevent his people learning how much their neighbours are prospering.
Why doesn’t China count as a democracy? People vote and the votes get counted and decide who runs things.
Why doesn’t North Korea count as a democracy? People vote and the votes get counted and decide who runs things. /s
Hmm, why isn’t the one-party state is considered a democracy? Truly baffling.
Why do you think voting for party is the only form of democracy?
Why don’t you?
why dont we want that if its outperforming democracies
Ah the old “ends justify the means” argument. I’ve seen this one before somewhere
“the means”, of course, being out-performing democracies
Can you give a briefer on how it’s outperforming democracies? I don’t mean to be confrontational, I really want to hear why you think that.
i dont have a briefer on how its outperforming democracies, im not the one that came up with that premise
Wait, what? But you said:
why dont we want that if its outperforming democracies
“the means”, of course, being out-performing democracies
I’m missing something here
hyperreality said
You don’t want authoritarianism to win the argument by out-performing democracies.
i argued based on that premise
you can tell because of the use of the word “if” in this sentence
why dont we want that >if< its outperforming democracies
if that premise was nonsense from the start they probably shouldnt have run an argument off it
Show me a single democracy anywhere in the world.
Its a democracy when you’re in the global north, it’s autocracy when you’re in the global south.
Alright I’ll bite, what makes the world’s declared democracies actually undemocratic in your mind?
Billionaires directly or indirectly buying elections, politicians, drafting policies, funding propaganda, regulatory capture, etc.
The democratic world doesn’t start and end with America
I live in Denmark. All liberal democracies are subject to the whims of billionaires.
Edit: oh wait, you’re Canadian. That’s fucking hilarious.
Sure, and I’ll agree that many places are actual democracies, but that doesn’t mean they’re free from corruption. You’re both sort of right. There are democracies that work. But none of them are without corruption.
The corruption is baked into the system. I did not have anything illegal in mind when I wrote that list.
There can be no democracy without economic democracy.
There can be no democracy without economic democracy.
Economic democracies are even rarer than political ones, and I’m not aware of any actually complete one. Europe still gets you closest, especially Germany and Austria, with very strong co-determination laws, in Germany’s case reserving 50% - 1 board seats for the shop floor council – the workers don’t need much capital in that case to control the company.
And as far as I’m aware there’s not, and never has been, a single country that is not politically a democracy that would be an economic democracy. Certain people might be thinking of state capitalist countries in that context but those never liked worker control of anything, not unions, not shop floor councils, not nothing. They just dressed themselves in it. Ask, random example, Solidarność.
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I love how you’re getting downvoted, likely by people who feel a sense of enlightenment in that they can identify Chinese propaganda that has been pointed out to them as such but have no clue about propaganda originating from their own country or from a country theirs is allied with.
Why is propaganda always the go-to argument? Even if I identify US propaganda, it doesn’t make me more or less likely to hate it, which I don’t, even if I disapprove of some of their measures as much as I do of my own country. It’s such a baffling argument.
Because most people are steeped in propaganda they don’t see.
You say you don’t hate USA. You should. The US state is engaged in several ongoing genocides. Can you name them?
“You should” 😂 Sounds to me like you have an agenda and are spreading propaganda of your own. But please, enlighten me on those genocides with reliable sources.
I have convictions that inform my opinions. I think it’s obvious that any decent person should hate USA, given their many, many crimes.
I guess you could characterize all communication as propaganda, but that seems rather pointless.
It’s not pointless to say that when it’s clear that you want to drive public opinion by only emphasizing and exaggerating the bad without sources. It’s the literal definition of propaganda.
I still welcome that list of ongoing genocides with their credible sources.
good to know Earth resources are used in rational and sustainable manner.
It looks like you mixed up the fields for your password and username. TL;DR: you’ve got a password-looking username
Also, I agree with your comment.
This is a feature, not a bug :)
The half finished apartment complexes and ones that are collapsing already because they build them with bamboo instead of cement would indicate otherwise. Look up tofu-dreg projects/buildings for a good laugh. So much of the rapid construction done in the last 20-30 years in China is going to be in landfills far before it should be…
Considering China’s population shrank by nearly 1 million last year and it predicted to drop by ~700 million by 2100.
This is not going to get better.
When you make the only safe place for money real estate, then your corrupt Politicians make that only safe for the wealthy and connected, you end up with a lot of empty useless real estate.
Are you talking about China or Toronto?
Yes
For many mainland Chinese people, real estate is the only place they can invest their money. Traditionally and culturally it’s also seen as the only possible way to rise up and do better.
The money export controls make it difficult for the average guy to move his money abroad as well.
So there are many Chinese people putting retirement or family savings into these places because they don’t have other options.
They have also just had a very long run of easy government backed mortgage support, making it a bit too easy to borrow money for these properties.
It’s crazy and doesn’t make long term sense when the number of domiciles exceeds the number of people.
Wait so China might be having an economic crisis in coming years?
A lot of signs point to it already beginning.
This is a quick reminder that (looking at you fellow Americans) authoritarian governments are incredibly inefficient economically at best, are always ran by idiots, and are completely detrimental to everything at worst.
Can… can they move those apartments here?
If you’d like to die from building collapse, or at the best least have your shit apartment literally falling apart in less than a few years
No need, just need to force them to sell their property here along with all the other rich people who are holding on to vacant property as an investment. There are plenty of homes in most places if they’d do something like double the property tax on any property that’s vacant more than a few months per year.
It’s almost as if the idea of endless growth is a bad one…
but GrOwTh
What will we ever do without gRoWtH
This is important, not least because making the cement and steel for these surplus apartments and associated road infrastructure makes an enormous contribution to global CO2 emissions. Look at how the emissions took off after 2005. So the sooner the bubble bursts, the better for the climate.
Then they’ll expend CO2 removing the abandoned structures, and building other things on top of some of that, and another bubble will be coming down the pipe sooner or later.
We need to fix the systems that let these bubbles occur in the first place
I recall a presentation by a key guy in China’s planning system (NDRC-ERI) - it was clear that their plan all along was for the peak construction to coincide with the peak working-age population - which is why they would never concede to reduce emissions earlier. They had a long-term view including demographics (more than most governments consider), but the process got its own momentum and became the bubble - also related to city-government financing incentives as well as risky tycoons. Now the problem with such over-planning is that the next generation may not thank them for the legacy of this type of construction (and CO2), and prefer to live in smaller houses or away from the coast (as Shanghai, Tianjin, etc. will be flooded due to same CO2), hence as you say even more reconstruction (and more CO2). But the peak has passed, what really matters next is whether India will repeat similar mistakes.
Nah. China’s urbanization rate is currently 65%. South Korea for comparison has 82% urbanization rate. So the Chinese have plenty more (say, a hundred million or so more) homes to build. The current difficulties are more to do with (i) loss of consumer confidence caused by the leadership’s bad economic management, and (ii) the deliberate restriction of credit to developers because of the government’s concerns about debt.
This analysis reminds me of the hoo-hah about China’s “ghost cities” circa 2010. Those ghost cities ended up being filled up.
There are still vast ghost cities in that country, so no they don’t actually all fill up
Sooo many empty or partially used shopping malls
In China or the US?
Haha both!
I dunno which is worse. The ones in China were never used, just built and left to rot. Many in the US had some decades of glory, then ended up with the same fate.
Enough of them filled up that even the press outlets that pushed the ghost cities narrative most aggressively, like Bloomberg, have run follow-up stories acknowledging it.
Yes, some developments worked out and others didn’t, but building out housing in advance of increasing urbanization is a good thing, not a bad thing. It’s how you avoid housing unaffordability in urban centers, or worse, the rise of slums.
Building housing 15 or 20 years ahead of time isn’t a good thing. When people move in, the places are already old. Apartment buildings deteriorate over time even with no one living in them. It’s clearly wasteful to build them that early and there’s definitely a huge property bubble in China.
It’s not 15 or 20 years ahead of time, though. The “ghost cities” came alive within only a few years; for example, this page points to Zhengdong New District, which was singled out as a ghost city by 60 Minutes in 2013. It had a population of 5 million seven years later. For district development (as opposed to constructing a single building), seven years is nothing.
Coming back to their current property crisis: let’s assume the article is correct that there’s an excess of 7 million homes. We can plug this into China’s current urbanization rate, and suppose China will get to South Korea’s urbanization rate in 20 years (that’s roughly how far they’re behind SK, by GDP per capita). At one home for every 3.5 people, they need 3.4 million homes per year on average. So they have overshot by about 2 years, which is hardly going to make buildings crumble.
And China’s population is projected to fall under 1 billion again over the next decades, making this a shit show circus. So many apartments bought as an investment will never see any occupancy and will likely just be abandoned. They got entire empty ghost towns already
It’s not for them. It’s so they can buy them and charge exorbitant rents to the next generation looking for a place to call their own, but can’t afford one of their own.
There is no next generation to rent them to…China’s population is shrinking.
Doubt they have that multi-generational 4D chess in mind
if only their regime weren’t so repressive, homeless americans would be flocking there for a place to live.
