From The Telegraph via Yahoo Finance, August 23:
China is tearing down tower blocks and pausing construction on buildings that could house 75m people as Xi Jinping’s government seeks to prop up the country’s stalling property market.
Analysts have warned Beijing has adopted a “build, pause, demolish, repeat” strategy as Chinese officials seek to restrict supply to avoid a plunge in house prices and boost economic activity through more construction.
Researchers at Fathom Consulting revealed that around 3bn square metres of housing has been put on pause or demolished in recent years, stopping properties reaching the market. It is enough to house 75m people, more than the entire population of the UK.
Indebted Chinese developers have been plunged into crisis as the struggling property market weighs heavily on the world’s second-largest economy. China has vast unoccupied “ghost cities” after huge amounts of debt-fuelled development while demolitions have increased as builders run out of money.
Joanna Davies, head of China economics at Fathom, said that houses on average take a “staggering” eight years to be completed as supply is “drip fed into the system”....
....MUCH MORE
China Goes Full Keynesian, Builds 27 Story Building, Demolishes It
Who needs banknotes in bottles?
Also July 7, 2022:
"China Prepares $220 Billion Stimulus With Tsunami Of Bond Sales"
Because more debt and more infrastructure spending is exactly what China needs.
The only thing better would be building thousands more apartment and condo towers.
Or:
"If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coalmines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again (the right to do so being obtained, of course, by tendering for leases of the note-bearing territory), there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of the repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital wealth also, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is. It would, indeed, be more sensible to build houses and the like; but if there are political and practical difficulties in the way of this, the above would be better than nothing."
Related, November 1, 2012: "Frequent Bridge Collapses Help Boost China’s GDP"
According to a Jingyang Net report, Wang Yang, Party secretary of Guangdong Province, said at a provincial Party meeting in 2009: “Sometimes the GDP number looks good, but it didn’t really create wealth for society. It was, instead, a waste of society’s wealth....
Finally, from the psychic or psycho file, May 2022:
Copper: It Is All About China's Economy
If China ever begins tearing down the tens of millions of apartments that are sitting empty the amount of supply from copper that will be recycled is mind boggling. Barring that, the huge cutback in residential construction has taken one of the largest demand factors out of the equation and except for the run-up in price we saw immediately after Russia invaded Ukraine, when it appeared China was converting their foreign exchange holdings into just about any kind of tangible stuff that would be storable, grains, metals etc., the trend since the Shanghai lockdowns became widely publicized has been pretty much unidirectional....
4.2190 down 0.0360 (-0.85%) last.
That was then. The red one is changing hands at $3.4125 today having touched 3.1315 in July (and looking at a return visit, methinks)
