Don’t walk too close to a tall building in China
You’ll see why, if you watch this [hat tip: commenter “DNW”]:
Apparently it all has to do with this phenomenon:
Construction of “commodity housing” is driven by the disparity between urban and rural land prices. Rural land, which must be collectively owned, is redesignated by a municipality as urban-construction land, which can then be resold by the municipality at as much as forty times the price. He explains that municipalities must pass on about 40% percent of their tax revenues to Beijing and are responsible for about 80% of their expenses. Hence, there is an incentive to seek non-tax-income streams. According to Shepard, as of 2015, “40% of the revenue that local governments in China make is from land sales.” The Party further incentivizes construction on this newly urban land by using local GDP growth as one of the indicators that makes a local government look good within the Party.
In 2012, this type of development created $438 billion (394 billion euros) for China’s local governments.
Developers acquire new plots of land from local governments and are mandated to construct something more or less immediately. Developers can’t sit idly on vacant land and wait for the surrounding area to develop until it’s economically viable. This creates the quick-buck mentality in developers to rapidly build in the new area without the necessary demand for housing, new industries essential for employment to sustain the housing and new community.
Speed is of the essence. And it’s all due to control by the Party. Capitalism in China works a bit differently than here.
This next video was made in 2013, and it’s exceedingly bizarre. I’m surprised I hadn’t heard about this before. Paris, anyone?:
I looked up the city’s Wiki entry, and it appears that the population has not increased. The description included this:
Originally planned as a city for around 10,000 inhabitants, the current population of Tianducheng is estimated at around 2,000 people, many of whom are working on a nearby French-themed amusement park.
I would say the whole thing is a “French-themed amusement park,” although it doesn’t seem very amusing.
Reminds me a bit of California before and after the credit bust of 2008. People were bidding up the price of home real-estate that was a 1 to 2 hour commute (one-way) from hubs like SF, San Jose & silicon valley. Then home prices peaked, Bernanke cut Fed interest rates to zero, and finally gasoline prices went over $5/gal. The whole long commute gambit imploded.
The city in the first video was a 1.5 hour drive outside Shenzhen.
It would seem to be a scam, whereby the people in the country who have accumulated some money, are induced to turn it over to those in power (who are likely siphoning it off into their own bank accounts). I’m guessing this is a last-ditch effort to skim money from the country before it all collapses (Venezula, anyone?).
Expect it to happen in the next few years.
It’s already causing ripples in places like Australia where the Chinese were buying up mined natural resources like pies at a footy game…and then they weren’t so much.
So…there seems a day in the not-too-distant future where all these ghost cities will be seen as the boondoggle they are & the collapse across the board will be the beginning of something ugly like we’ve never seen. Let’s don’t forget…China still has a bunch of mouths to feed and a big military at its disposal.
It is always the kickbacks.
China is most likely even more corrupt in terms of personal bribery than even Mexico is.
There are stories that corrupt agencies use attractive female agents to sell real estates, as she gets a kickback, by trading sex for 10+ million RMB sales. A perhaps more primitive version of the Hollywood DC elite standard.
Much of China’s economy is a Potemkin village. China stays afloat on stealing technology, corruption, cheap labor, and political repression.
I worked for a design for in the early 2000’s that did a lot of work in China. I never visited, but my boss did. The construction process was bizarre. Normally, buildings are built in order — for example, you don’t install the drywall until the electrician and plumbing. But in China, if the drywallers are there, they’ll install the drywall, and then the electrical and plumbing contractors will come in and tear out drywall to install it, which will then get patched as best as someone who doesn’t care will do. He saw a ton of flooring installed before the concrete was cured. Probably the most minoring thing was seeing insulation back-stuffed in some way. It’s been so long, I can’t remember, but I do remember the description of stuffing the insulation…
The media keep telling me that the US must block first on this tariff war, but this makes me think we got a shot at China blinking first. It’s not the Lion the left would have us believe.
What you’re looking at is construction committed by untrained men.
It’s taking them as much time to build things wrong as it would do things right.
One can only pray that such follies are the norm within the PLA.
The problems with empty cities of building in China may be bad construction and code of compliance for them. But let take away our senses o other side of this matter, just look around you on your streets and your neighbourhood how many Chines living or been living in western world or other part of the ward.
In my neighbourhood, till 2009 no Chinses face been seen here, in today time I can put 90% on the street face Chinses, more over there are completes house blokes of Chinses, there are China Town shopping centres there are a lot of demographic shift with this wave of Chines. So these massive population moved from homeland thus those Ghost Town crated at home land.
I was invited to a scientific meeting in the Crimea, Ukraine in 1994 that was held at what had been a Black Sea resort for Communist Party members before the collapse. The location was fantastic but the accommodations were bizzare.
The construction techniques were similar to the ones described in the videos. The bath tub in my room was poured concrete but they had never got around to lining it resulting in a rough sandstone finish inside. Using the toilet was always an adventure since it tended to fall apart when you sat on it.
I was told that staging of the materials during construction was haphazard. For example, the floor boards might arrive before the roof was even on the building, so they were just left outside in the elements until they were ready to be installed. The best result was warped floors. Sometimes you got pre-rotted floors.
Socialism at its finest.
No, you don’t need to know a thing about construction to observe the shoddy construction shown in this video. It’s that obvious.
This is a simple scam- shoddy construction sold to suckers.
In 1946 when I was 4 or 5 I had a globe and thought the way to learn about the world was to point to a country and ask my dad about it. When I got to China I recall he went on for some time explaining about Chiang Kai Shek and corruption and was pretty pessimistic about China’s chances of recovering from it. Obviously Mao wonderfully concentrated the collective Chinese mind by slaughtering unreckoned millions of people. Now it seems that as swampy as our swampy swamp is, the Chinese have abundantly rediscovered their ancestral tendencies.
parker Reading the post, I wondered what is the Chinese translation of “Potemkin”.