this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2023
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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.

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[–] [email protected] 130 points 1 year ago (10 children)

I find it interesting that everyone is calling this bad management when it's indicating one thing above all:

Productivity has well exceeded the requirements of the population.

People simply don't need to work that hard anymore, but all industrialized societies, even would-be socialists, simply can't stand the idea of letting the working class have leisure time.

[–] somethingsnappy 36 points 1 year ago (1 children)

UBI and robust social safety nets should have started with the industrial revolution. Every time a machine, computer, or now robots, UBI should have increased and been given to more people.

[–] Squizzy 8 points 1 year ago

Tax the automation!! Have companies pay employee taxes for self scanners and all automation. Let the workers live, let the machines work.

[–] Aceticon 15 points 1 year ago (6 children)

I look at my own country of Portugal with a massive realestate prices bubble were more than half the youths only leave their parent's home after they're 30, more than 50% of recent graduates emigrating when they get their degrees and schools in certain areas lacking teachers because houses there are too expensive for a teacher salary, and think that maybe what China has there is actually good thing, not a bad thing.

Yeah, sure, "investors" are suffering, but why should the other 99% of people care?!

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[–] AngryCommieKender 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I do wonder what's going to happen to all that property as China's population hits 700,000,000 or so

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)
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[–] mohammed_alibi 6 points 1 year ago

A lot of developed countries are going to see a decrease in population starting in the next 20 years and that will probably go on until the end of this century.

Our growth-minded economics needs to shift. Maybe we need to focus on how to gracefully decline. A decrease in revenue does not mean a company is not profitable. So that mindset needs to change.

We really need to focus on geriatric care, there will be a lot more old people than young people, so we need some way to get care to all the old people without over-burdening the young. More robots? Or robot-assisted care so that is it not so taxing on a nurse? I recently had to help a neighbor who was in declining health and mind, and man, I do not want myself to be in that state burdening my children and family. So we need some legislature to allow assisted suicide for those with terminal illness so I can go and die with dignity and grace.

Then we need a new de-construction industry that is focused on removing old buildings and old infrastructure and restoring the land back to its natural state. Otherwise we will have a plague of urban decay if that's not managed well.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Maybe if they actually built these things up to code it would take longer to build them in the first place. These things tend to collapse.

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[–] [email protected] 60 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (49 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] Astroturfed 11 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

I suspect a major reason for Putin's most recent crimes was to prevent his people learning how much their neighbours are prospering.

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[–] kSPvhmTOlwvMd7Y7E 42 points 1 year ago (2 children)

good to know Earth resources are used in rational and sustainable manner.

[–] Astroturfed 7 points 1 year ago

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....

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] kSPvhmTOlwvMd7Y7E 20 points 1 year ago

This is a feature, not a bug :)

[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Grimy 18 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Are you talking about China or Toronto?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago
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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Damn... Can't they disassemble them and ship them in the West?

[–] ledtasso 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

No thanks, China's infrastructure is of notoriously bad quality.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)
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[–] nucleative 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

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.

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[–] mightyfoolish 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

Can... can they move those apartments here?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

I'm 99% sure they wouldn't pass a safety inspection.

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[–] FlyingSquid 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's almost as if the idea of endless growth is a bad one...

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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 CO~2~ emissions. Look at how the emissions took off after 2005. So the sooner the bubble bursts, the better for the climate.

[–] 1847953620 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

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