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Comment by ianai | Hacker News Reader

Who's expecting a decline in construction demand in China? I think I've heard this a few places, granted, but have they really built up enough for their whole population (that would want it)?

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China's population will start shrinking around 2025, and there's a real estate bubble that's clearly starting to deflate right now.

Obviously China is still a poor country and there's a lot of housing stock being upgraded, so it's not going to be a complete collapse, but I do expect construction to slow down both in the short and long term.

China still has a lot of urbanization to do.

Depopulation hits the non-urbanized areas first, since the first thing young people in the countryside do is move to the big city. Much of China will never be urbanized.

The Chinese government is cracking down on debt-fueled property developers.

Well, they are also doing the opposite again, now.

They are pushing for more development to keep the economy going. It's all a mess.

too late, evergrande is already defaulting on 350 billion $, other companies cant finish construction mandated by government, suppliers dont give credit anymore, people are ansioux to buy "homes on paper" (RE devoleper financing vehicle), homebuyers on unfinished homes are freezing mortage payment at record numbers due to completition challenges (these are literally personal loans with heavy penalties).

The central gov will have to squander trillions of RMB to clean this mess and fast. the reactionary & corrupt friendly nature of officials showed its results

they themselves, all land auctions of recent are bought by SOE

Usually people pick up the this narrative from TV, where some commentator like Gordon Chang is predicting the coming collapse of China.

Only problem is, the guy has been peddling that story since 2002.

There’s a difference between the collapse of China and a slowdown in their pace of construction. The CCP is intentionally trying to decrease the amount of construction and housing developers in China have been running into issues with debt repayments that the Chinese government doesn’t want to rescue.

in today media landscape there are a lot of sources of news about china that can filter out of the Great firewall and that are not pathetically parts of X agendas. I reccommend "the china show", "china in focus", "china update" and "china insights" on Youtube, they show unfortunately a darker face than any Bloomberg or "FOX" could ever do, and accurately (personal opinion).

Btw china has its real estate sector (homes fo speculation, public infrastructure for gov) debt fueld at unsustainable levels (affecting also tax revenues at local level that are dependent or land leasing for financing themselves), the bubble is bursting, how fast and dangerously will depend from gov reaction. bail out is the most sounding solution but the gov is doing too much QE already and will have to make sacrifices here or there. Easy growth is over forever, skills are neeeded now, a problem with XI leadership.

China residential construction growth is slowing. Their rates of urbanization have almost reached levels seen in developed countries. People are paying close attention to where China goes from here.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-22/china-hou...

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