It's not only china that does this, and it's not only Vancouver that is the destination for this, it's just Vancouver is a popular destination for pacific rim countries for this AND has no superstar industry to speak of like London & NYC to help balance this.

In SF, NYC & London you can also partly blame their superstar industries and economic growth on the RE market, but NYC/London also has their empty Condo buildings too, and their equivalent of 'wealthy chinese' is 'wealthy russian'.

Ex: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/21/upshot/when-the-empty-apa...

https://theweek.com/articles/736313/how-foreign-investors-la...