China's property sector, once the pillar of the economy, has slumped since 2021 when real estate giant China Evergrande Group defaulted on its debt obligations following a clampdown on new borrowing.

Even China’s population of 1.4 billion would not be enough to fill all the empty apartments littered across the country, a former official said on Saturday, in a rare public critique of the country’s crisis-hit property market.

China’s property sector, once the pillar of the economy, has slumped since 2021 when real estate giant China Evergrande Group (3333.HK) defaulted on its debt obligations following a clampdown on new borrowing.

Big-name developers such as Country Garden Holdings (2007.HK) continue to teeter close to default even to this day, keeping home-buyer sentiment depressed.

As of the end of August, the combined floor area of unsold homes stood at 648 million square metres (7 billion square feet), the latest data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) show.

That would be equal to 7.2 million homes, according to Reuters calculations, based on the average home size of 90 square metres.

  • Hyperreality@kbin.social
    424·
    2 years ago

    The world is really lucky that China’s not doing that great at the moment. Not so long ago, China was winning the propaganda war internationally.

    You don’t want authoritarianism to win the argument by out-performing democracies.

    • JasSmith@kbin.social
      233·
      2 years ago

      I agree. I don’t think we had or have anything to fear. The Chinese educational system is built around obedience, cultural homogeneity, and rote learning. Sure, there are fewer protests, and there is less crime, but also a SEVERE lack of innovation. I can count on one hand the number of innovations China has exported to the world in the last decade. Everything they build of note is based on stolen IP and figurative and literal slave labour. The world is finally clamping down on the former, and China’s social progression to a service-based economy is putting an end to the latter. Their comparative competitive advantages are eroding by the day.

    • Astroturfed@lemmy.worldEnglish
      82·
      2 years ago

      They’ve hit the middle income trap while simultaneously upsetting all their trading partners. It’s not going to be a pretty fall from grace. Fake numbers saying how awesome things are only work for so long.

    • Meowoem@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      312·
      2 years ago

      Why doesn’t China count as a democracy? People vote and the votes get counted and decide who runs things.