Hacker News Reader

Comment by gsky | Hacker News Reader

I think we will see more ghost towns being built to prop up the GDP

CCP has been doing the opposite for the past year, letting the big construction companies go out of business and not bail them out and letting the housing bubble deflate, with housing becoming more affordable. That is actually the biggest reason for the bad economic numbers (at least available numbers, since the youth unemployment is being "revisited") coming lately from China. IMO don't think people should be worried if magic numbers (GDP) go down because housing is becoming affordable.

CCP does whatever it takes to avoid high level unemployment which causes riots. That's why going GDP sounds bad for CCP.

Do you really think CCP cares about housing affordability?

Either it's a war or roads to nowhere to keep their population busy.

> Do you really think CCP cares about housing affordability?

Yes, absolutely so

Keeping people "busy" (distracted) in 2023 is really easy. Just give them a smartphone and unlimited Internet access.

So I'm not sure your theory holds up.

How are they gonna feed their families and what would they do if they can't?

I don’t know about that. Social media in the West has encouraged behaviors (greater outness of LGBT, advocacy for minorities, new subcultures like furries) that the CCP feels, at least in the Chinese context, would pose a risk to social stability and harmony.

China expends huge effort on keeping its citizens’ internet activity tightly censored and surveilled. Its authorities might even have preferred that the Chinese population did not have smartphones with unlimited internet and were instead kept more atomized, but the cat is already out of the bag and the internet is too important to the economy.

Unlimited as in no time/data limit, not "unlimited Western propaganda"

Yes, I understood that.

My father came back from a visit to China maybe a decade ago with hundreds of pictures of ghost cities full of empty skyscrapers. Turns out there’s a Wikipedia article about the phenomenon, and it says that they are filling up with people over time and getting used as intended. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under-occupied_developments_in...

In the US it seems like most builds don’t get started until after it’s acutely needed. Makes sense given the way development investment works here. I know the situation is much more complicated in China than just where the money comes from, but maybe it’s a little bit of a good thing to build housing supply in advance of the demand? It seems like China’s economy supports doing that in a way that the US’s doesn’t.

What would the logic be? If it’s just government pouring money into the economy it would work just as well to spend it on space or science or education or whatever. Who benefits from building empty houses as a capital sink?

The problem here is that you have provincial level leaders with a 7th grade education who are dictated to up their GDP to a certain number. They know that building something will do the trick and at the same time prop up their personal unofficial finances via bribes and whatnot. So it continues...

Most provincial level leaders in China are likely better educated than their Western counterparts due to strict civil service exam and promotion hierarchy of progressively larger municipal management responsibilities

What is on that exam? Do you have any source for the average education attainment in provincial China?

https://www.ted.com/talks/eric_x_li_a_tale_of_two_political_...

This talk is definitely propaganda to a degree, but describes the Chinese administrative promotion system.

https://www.hoover.org/sites/default/files/uploads/documents...

This study indicates that 2/3 of provincial leaders hold advanced degrees. I don’t have the comparative one for the US but I am pretty certain this is not the case for governors.

No source was requested for the claim that they have 7th grade education, I’ll note.

Ghost towns are like roads to nowhere. FYI China has enough houses for all

I don’t know about the mansions in the article, but my (limited) understanding is that the intention is to build cities that do get used, not to leave them empty forever, and that part of the reason is to help relieve population pressures on the larger cities like Beijing and Shanghai. They just sometimes build entire cities before anyone moves in, unlike they way cities develop elsewhere, little by little as people move in.

I dunno how leaning into their bursting real estate bubble is going to help GDP.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com