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It’s not just that. The evergrande crisis is a good example that their real estate companies are essentially a Ponzi scheme, did you know that in China,
most people buy a home before it’s ever built
And that everyone tries to buy brand new homes because it’s “bad luck” to buy previously owned homes
And that the concrete used in many of these homes is made from. Beach sand (ie it won’t last more than a handful of years) due to cost cutting corrupt practices
that the real estate companies rely on debt to build and if they aren’t made whole by gov (because consumers often refuse to or cannot pay) they will collapse
the above is made worse because housing prices are starting to collapse due to a bunch of factors, so people are paying for mortgages for houses that they cannot sell and get their money back, there’s no appreciation so people are just refusing to buy now
huge numbers of houses sit empty (ghost cities are a massive problem). These buildings decay and are essentially a total loss.
But besides all that, there’s also the problem of municipal debt. You see, in China municipal governments make all of their money through taxing developers. But if the developers stop building (see points above) then the cities cannot pay for their budgets anymore. We are already seeing budgetary crises across many Chinese cities. The CCP will have to bail these cities out as well. But with what money?
All of these crises are made worse by the fact that unemployment is a giant problem. The gov stopped collecting stats on this because it was so bad but about 1/3 of young Chinese are unemployed, and this number will soar due to tariffs
You don’t want to own a Chinese built flat. See above points. It’s quite often tofu dreg, or built in the middle of nowhere
You also have to remember China is an incredibly censorious state. It’s a black box, you will never hear about its problems generally. The CCP insisted they had like, 7 deaths from COVID during the entirety of the pandemic. When we can accurately guess there has been millions of deaths. But if YOU didn’t hear about it? Must be an amazing system!
Hard to say. Most of the births are now in the countryside to poor peasant farmers. Hardly “elite human capital”
One of Scott's book reviews had a neat thesis that homesteading peasants are the first step of the magic formula that produced the Asian tiger countries.
Totally would expect this to produce a better sort of human capital than the Western combo of iPad + tiktok + sleeping through primary ed.
Tried very cursorily to search if the Chinese peasants are the homesteading sort and got as first hit a local paper which sounds like yes, and they now want to run down the homestead system. Maybe that's how they finally fall flat.
Sure. Except the Chinese already have their own version of this. Many Chinese kids are basically checked out of society . “lying flat” is the name of the current youth movement in China, and it’s pretty self explanatory
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If the apartments fall apart, then they can simply move into the ghost cities - problem solves itself.
Seriously, these things may be true to a certain extent but real estate is not the defining feature of the economy. Production is the defining feature of the economy, production of goods. All else rests on top of production. There are no services without goods, even prostitutes need condoms and lingerie...
China is good at cost-efficient production, therefore it follows that their economy is strong regardless of the situation in real estate or whatever else. If the Soviet Union was the biggest producer of manufactured goods on the planet, bigger than the next 10 combined, then it would still be here today. Soviet production was weak, nobody ever cared to tariff Soviet exports because nobody in their right mind wanted to buy a Soviet car, television or anything but oil and minerals.
This is the reverse of the truth. We in the West hear nothing but bad news about China. We hear about protests in Hong Kong, genocide of the uyghurs, trouble with the Dalai Lama, pollution, liveleak industrial accidents, people getting locked in their homes for COVID, people getting their organs stolen, suppression of Christianity, Social Credit (which is blown out of proportion), repression of the LGBT, backdoors in Tiktok and all other Chinese products... and this shadow banking crisis that has been about to destroy the Chinese economy for the last 10, 15, 20 years. I was taught about it in school.
There are positives as well as negatives, the media is only interested in fostering hatred and contempt, preparing people psychologically for war with China. It's just like the 'Iran is 6 months, 3 weeks, 5 milliseconds away from getting the Bomb!' narrative, fearmongering and warmongering. They want us to hate China and also think they'll be easy to defeat, to manufacture consent for war. But in reality China is a very strong country and we need to be more realistic. War may be inevitable but we shouldn't go in half-cocked, assuming our enemies are made of tofu.
The ghost cities are often comprised of the same materials…
Housing is close to one third of china’s GDP. So, sure it’s not the only feature but it’s a huge, gigantic feature of the Chinese economy
Yes they do have a great, huge manufacturing sector. They are still fairly a poor country on a per capita basis, which means threats to their economy loom larger for the average citizen. The Chinese only tolerate their overlords because they are slowly getting richer, but that is precisely when the risk of revolution is greatest is when the citizenry gets a taste of freedom. I think if their economy suddenly stopped growing and stagnated it would be quite devastating for them, far more than for America
As for news, I think we get fairly large amount of positive visions of China all the time online thanks in large part to a combination of wumaos and anti American feelings among internet extremists, who love to throw up glittery pictures of neon Chinese cities at night. -And - Wow look at their rail network! And their drone swarm shows, and drone delivery!
Meanwhile military leaders are getting purged for filling missiles with water instead of fuel. It’s really hard to gauge how strong they are when they haven’t fought a war in four decades (and lost all the wars they did fight)
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