There are about fifty abandoned cities in China. Based on electricity usage, it’s estimated that there are over 60,000,000 completely unused apartments.
China’s eerie ghost cities a ‘symptom’ of the country’s economic troubles and housing bubble
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Fancy villas, high-rise apartment blocks, lakes, parks and sprawling road networks: Ghost cities in China have it all. Just one crucial element is missing — the people.
Built for a population that never came, about 50 of these surreal sites lay desolate across the country. But still the construction continues.
These new cities are usually built in rural areas on the outskirts of existing cities.
Designed for populations numbering in the hundreds of thousands, the mass construction projects can include towering high-rise condominiums, huge shopping centres, city squares, street lights and replicas of cities in Europe and elsewhere.
Dinny McMahon, author of China’s Great Wall of Debt, explaine… Continue Reading (6 minute read)
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8 thoughts on “There are about fifty abandoned cities in China. Based on electricity usage, it’s estimated that there are over 60,000,000 completely unused apartments.”
These cities are built super low quality and a lot of times using unsafe/ inferior building materials and practices and are mostly uninhabitable.
The government builds this crap then uses it for collateral to borrow money. It’s just another scam their using to artificially inflate their wealth
Thats one hell of a bubble thats gonna burst some day, btw most of these arent abandoned they are never occupied, Spain had a similar property bubble before the 2008 stock market crash
Their current real estate bubble compared to the past US bubble is like a pebble vs the earth; it’s an incomprehensibly large amount of asset valuation that could be Thanos snapped in a millisecond. There is no way for it to end well. They just have to keep inflating it. Wild times.
This is a big reason why China’s economy looks as big as it does, and also partly why they will never surpass the US.
The Chinese economy is a lot of smoke and mirrors. Outside of the admittedly big manufacturing centers in the South, most of the Chinese economy is essentially a series of make-work jobs that don’t even exist to improve quality of life. They exist so Local Party Official A can show economic growth because that’s what he has to do to avoid prison today and political irrelevance in the 2000s.
Used to live there. They keep building more housing on a massive scale.
As well as people wanting to invest in property, a lot of people are superstitious about buying pre-owned property in case of bad energy left from previous occupants.
In addition, the ownership is likely to revert back to the Government eventually as it’s more like a lease of 70-90 years, although this has not yet been confirmed or denied by the Government for obvious reasons.
Vancouvers housing market makes sense now
These cities are built super low quality and a lot of times using unsafe/ inferior building materials and practices and are mostly uninhabitable.
The government builds this crap then uses it for collateral to borrow money. It’s just another scam their using to artificially inflate their wealth
Thats one hell of a bubble thats gonna burst some day, btw most of these arent abandoned they are never occupied, Spain had a similar property bubble before the 2008 stock market crash
Their current real estate bubble compared to the past US bubble is like a pebble vs the earth; it’s an incomprehensibly large amount of asset valuation that could be Thanos snapped in a millisecond. There is no way for it to end well. They just have to keep inflating it. Wild times.
Can you call something abandoned if they’ve never been occupied?
We passed some on the overnight train from Beijing to Xian. It was really eery.
This is a big reason why China’s economy looks as big as it does, and also partly why they will never surpass the US.
The Chinese economy is a lot of smoke and mirrors. Outside of the admittedly big manufacturing centers in the South, most of the Chinese economy is essentially a series of make-work jobs that don’t even exist to improve quality of life. They exist so Local Party Official A can show economic growth because that’s what he has to do to avoid prison today and political irrelevance in the 2000s.
Used to live there. They keep building more housing on a massive scale.
As well as people wanting to invest in property, a lot of people are superstitious about buying pre-owned property in case of bad energy left from previous occupants.
In addition, the ownership is likely to revert back to the Government eventually as it’s more like a lease of 70-90 years, although this has not yet been confirmed or denied by the Government for obvious reasons.