In 2012, I traveled for about 6 weeks in China. I saw a lot of large cities -- not the megalopolises of Beijing and Shanghai but Guangzhou, Xi'an, Kunming -- with unreal amounts of what looked like high-end real estate going up. if you moved to the countryside, things got a lot poorer, so there was a pretty clear disconnect.

But the weirder thing was endlessly empty malls. For whatever reason, high-end luxury malls had all been built _before_ the in-progress housing stock, and they had already found tenants who were stores way out of my (comparatively wealthy!) price range: gucci, prada, etc.

So it seemed like the plan was to move a lot of people from the country to the city and provide them with high-end malls to shop at. But the problem was that those people were poor. It struck me as unlikely that they'd be rich enough to buy Fendi bags by the time they moved in. And the malls were standing dead empty until that happened.

None of this made any sense, and it was happening on an absurdly huge scale. (I can't remember where I read this, but I like the line that went like: "There is no precedent for how big things are in China, because there's never been anything as big as China.")

This seemed like a phenomenal misallocation of resources, so it was -- and is -- very hard to believe that a country making such crazy decisions was actually going to become wealthy and stable.

So pretty much everything I read about China's economic development, I don't believe. It all seems like a house of cards. Articles like this one, however, are much easier to grok.