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.

    • @spartanatreyu@programming.devEnglish
      16•1 year ago

      “the means” in this case would be authoritarian repression.

      “The means” always has to be something bad for the “ends” to try and justify reaching for “the means”.

    • LemminaryEnglish
      3•1 year ago

      Can you give a briefer on how it’s outperforming democracies? I don’t mean to be confrontational, I really want to hear why you think that.

      • Lols [they/them]English
        2•1 year ago

        i dont have a briefer on how its outperforming democracies, im not the one that came up with that premise

        • LemminaryEnglish
          2•1 year ago

          Wait, what? But you said:

          why dont we want that if its outperforming democracies

          “the means”, of course, being out-performing democracies

          I’m missing something here

          • Lols [they/them]English
            2•1 year ago

            hyperreality said

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

            i argued based on that premise

            you can tell because of the use of the word “if” in this sentence

            why dont we want that >if< its outperforming democracies

            if that premise was nonsense from the start they probably shouldnt have run an argument off it

            • LemminaryEnglish
              2•1 year ago

              Ahh, right, thank you for clarifying. The way the thread is structured made it seem like you were the one claiming that even though you were bouncing off the other comment. I’ll need to be more careful.