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Comment by muninn_ | Hacker News Reader

Well. It's probably better than other things they spent their money on. Like empty cities.

Curiously, one difference with planned economies like China is they can build ahead of demand. Here in the USA there has to be a demand for housing before it gets built. I.e. folks have to be crowded and homeless. So those 'empty cities' build for 10M people were not as senseless as they seem. 10M people in China is less than 1% after all.

You can't really talk about China being a planned economy at this point. I mean, planning goes on but it's like economic planning in Japan - something the government does through incentives and persuasion rather than commands and production quotas.

You can read the Wikipedia page on these for the actual reasons they happen[1]. It's all about Chinese local governments selling property to speculators to raise revenue and the speculators having to build to hold them rather than just sitting on the lots like regular capitalist speculators can. This does represent an inefficient use of resources but not a huge one, past ghost towns have all been filled eventually. Rapid growth covers a multitude of sins. Goodness knows what'll happen when the growth slows, as it must, but there's no particular reason to think that'll happen soon.

This is yet another way that China looks like early 19th century US. Not only are they copying industrial designs a la Samuel Slater and industrializing rapidly, they're financing local government via land speculation the way we did in the US back then. Hopefully when they have their equivalent of the panic of 1839 they'll make similar reforms.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_under-occupied_develop...

That's an interesting point. I just checked, and China is about 56% urbanized, whereas the United States sits above 80%. If we assume that China will reach the same levels, that leaves another 250 million people yet to move to urban areas. Even with the aging population, then, it may be able to use those spaces.

Otherwise, it may be able to take advantage of anti-immigrant sentiment in the developed world. That's what intrigued me about your point. China has started to invest in African infrastructure, so why not leverage that to supplement its population when the aging curse kicks in?

>China has started to invest in African infrastructure, so why not leverage that to supplement its population when the aging curse kicks in?

Perhaps because the entity is not "China", a state, but China, a culture and a specific population with a shared history etc? So arbitrarily supplementing the population as a means to keep it going doesn't make sense?

It seems that you're assuming that there is some Real Chinese Culture that has never evolved or integrated another population or culture. Maybe I've heard wrong, and there are in fact no substantial differences between Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong (let alone Xinjiang[1]). That seems incorrect, though.

Edit: Anyway, it's besides the point: we were clearly talking about China the state (the same one that built those empty cities).

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang

>It seems that you're assuming that there is some Real Chinese Culture that has never evolved or integrated another population or culture.

I'm only recognizing that there is a Chinese culture that has been shaped by various forces (including population migration, trade, and even war and invasion) over long historical periods (keyword: long).

Which doesn't translate to some "Since we had e.g. the Mongols in the 13th century, and they are now part of Chinese culture, it's no biggie to just get some hundreds of millions of people that don't share our culture to replace our aging population" -- any more than "Since we were subjects to the Queen before 1776 it's no biggie to subject ourselves to being a UK colony again".

>Maybe I've heard wrong, and there are in fact no substantial differences between Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong

That only matters if they are also more substantial than those between "Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong" to Berlin, Phoenix, Santiago, Accra or London.

Otherwise, all, or almost all, countries have regional differences within the country's culture. Beijing and Shanghai are not more different than, say, New York and Savannah or New Orleans and the Quad Cities. As for Hong Kong that has been, for over a century, shaped from being a UK colony.

Cities in the US are not crowded by any metric. Homelessness is typically not because of lack of housing either (I know that sounds weird to say) but more so disease, mental health problems, lack of employment opportunities or in some cases employment desire.

At first glance your comment sounds great, yeah China is just anticipating demand, but it seems much more likely it was a wonton spending spree to help the economy continue on. With that spending spree coming to a halt, now China has millions of steelworkers, miners, construction works, etc... out of work.

Nobody is going to want to live in those cities because they want to live in established cities. Ask yourself, if the goal was to anticipate demand, why wouldn't you do all of this construction alongside established cities? Why would you often times do it in the middle of nowhere?

Most are filled (already). An estimated 250M will be moving to cities in the next decade. The few much-publicized empty cities are due to bad planning of course. But that doesn't mean they didn't have great success with others.

And the new plan going forward is to 'urbanize' already-existing places, which means building an urban center around an existing town. So it can expand outward, starting with a core of city services and administration.

Those empty cities weren't the result of state planning, they are simply the savings accounts of people who don't trust banks.

You can see the same thing happening in central London, Vancouver and New York on a smaller scale. Plenty of housing in upscale neighborhoods bought as an investment and left empty.

I definitely dispute the idea that homelessness is what drives construction in the United States. And I'd argue that in some cases building goes on "ahead of demand" in the USA as well, though it admittedly takes a lot of capital to do so, and of course it doesn't occur to the extent that China's planned economy allows for. (It also faces the same pitfalls; see Atlantic City, NJ for example.)

I'd also submit that constructing buildings which never get occupied (or don't get occupied until they begin falling into a state of disrepair) is totally senseless regardless of scale.

That's completely wrong. Entrepreneurs develop products ahead of demand all the time.

If they are even a few months ahead of demand, then they have a name: failed startups. In a free market, you have to have a demand the second you have a supply, else bankrupt.

Which cities are currently empty? China has 160 cities with over a million people. The US has 10. They seem to be doing a good at getting people there.

http://www.cnn.com/2012/01/20/world/asia/china-florcruz-urba...

Are strict administrative cities the right comparison?

We have 50 MSAs with 1 million+:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Metropolitan_Statistic...

I think they aren't the right comparison either but quite a few cities are at the center of a larger built up area.

Here's some chilling photos of a few of those empty cities:

http://www.businessinsider.com/these-chinese-cities-are-ghos...

China is moving people into the cities:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2016/04/23/chinas-la...

Sounds like they build them first then move in the people. Probably cheaper and faster that way? They do have 1.3 billion people.

They are building ahead of the collapse of their labor pool as the population greys to an precedented degree.

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