Even 1.4 billion people can’t fill China’s vacant homes, ex-official admits

But the article probably could have done better quantifying the unused and partially completed units better. It’s lazy reporting to quote the official stats and not the estimates, which are certainly available.

Eh... that's not unused space, that's non existent space. What percentage of those have no actual on the ground progress, hence are total bullshit?

There's this idea that one of the reasons that US workers (and workers in the West more generally) had a relatively good standard of living during the Cold War, was that Western countries were facing competition from the Soviet Union. Would Britain have built all that social housing? Would it have created the NHS? Would America have permitted as much unionization as existed? Possibly not, if it weren't for the Soviet threat. And is it a coincidence that we had waves of privitization in the West at the same time that the Soviet Union was collapsing? So goes the thinking.

Now, the reality was that the Soviet Union was a totalitarian state, and it's unlikely that you'd actually want to live there. Granted, they may have done certain things well, like putting up Khrushchevkas. But the political situation was terrible and the material quality of life was not very good.

Nevertheless, maybe the existence of a competitor did spur the US and other countries to do better.

(There are other more cut-and-dry examples of this, e.g., much earlier, Bismarck outflanking the Socialists in Germany with state healthcare.)

And, for all the negatives of the Chinese system today, it's hard to argue that they don't build a lot very quickly. (Quality may be an issue sometimes, but I'm still impressed by a lot of what's accomplished.)

So, my half-tongue-in-cheek proposal is that China use its known strengths to offer a better deal than Western governments can, not just to e.g. African nations via BRI, but also to Western and even US citizens. It's not really that I think Westerners would be wise to go there (I know full well that there must be a propaganda element to the example of the Australians that I used). It's that Western leaders seem entirely content to let lucrative problems like the housing crisis fester, and it would be fantastic if there were some credible alternative to spur action.

Basically, life should be better for citizens if governments are competing for legitimacy with them.

Seems arbitrary to equate all Chinese and not just equate all humans. There is no evidence to suggest stupidity is geographically constrained by concepts of nationality.