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Comment by brookst | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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.

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

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