The Secret behind China's Ghost Cities

What is truly the purpose of these hollow concrete labyrinths, what secret lies within?

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DOCUMENTARY LINKS:
Conquering Southern China:

Conquering Northern China:

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Music used: The Muse Maker

[serpentza]

I've actually visited these ghost cities and have come to understand exactly what secret is hidden in these bizarre concrete labyrinths, thank you so much for supporting what I do by watching my videos, you're all incredibly awesome!!
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[metaljack]

Meanwhile there are millions living in squalor, barely a roof over their heads ... What a waste ...
What a damaged world

[Chris.Davies]

It's pretty sad.
Here in NZ, our home has practically tripled in value in ten years, as successive governments have utterly failed to keep land and building prices reasonable. Young people are pretty much locked out of the market today. It is a national tragedy.

[Ifraneljadida]

I'm a mortgage broker. However this finally ends.... it can only lead to a depression in China worse than has ever been seen in human history. It is impossible for me to accurately relay how bad it is. The 2008 US housing crisis is absolutely nothing compared to this. It is a fatal error made by the Chinese system - it will kill their government. Literally.

[icydevil_]

Never been to china, don’t plan to, but recently I went to a city that was dominated by the Chinese in Cambodia called Sihanouk ville. It was SHOCKING the amount of empty buildings, empty hotels, restaurants, casinos etc.

The local Cambodians left because Chinese investors bought all the land and started pushing local businesses out, this causes tourism to die out as people want to go to Cambodia for Cambodian culture, not Chinese (all the stores, casinos etc were all Chinese dominated). It’s honestly so sad to see.

[MikeInHalifax]

In Nova Scotia there was a property tax loophole that assessed homes still under construction for just the land it was on. This resulted in people nor quite finishing construction by not building the front door steps. Driving around rural areas you would see many homes without doorsteps

[marloelefant]

My Chinese wife wanted to buy a second apartment, but I rejected her: Not only are the prices unaffordable, but also the value of a property is always subject to supply and demand. If almost every family in China as two or more houses on average, who would buy your apartment if you were to sell it later? If there's any point in time where many people want to sell their apartments, the prices will drop significantly, and you could only sell an apartment at a loss. It's a bubble, nothing else. And the worst thing is that building all these houses is a giant waste of resources and pollutes the environment for no valid reason. It's terrible.

[leokimvideo]

What we see in Australia is the Chinese will pay absolute top dollar for apartments. This just sets up a unrealistic real estate bubble price while the Chinese pump the market paying too much. When they stop pumping the market thats when the bubble starts to pop. That's the point were at in Australia now.

[peacetheory]

Riding through a ghost city on a bike sounds like a bucket list item!

[Ifraneljadida]

I'm a mortgage broker. The fact the mortgage payment is $4, 400 while the potential rent is only I mean, that's absolutely shocking. That is unbelievably bad. I've done mortgages for just about any type of property in Florida and that is so much worse than anything I've ever seen that there are no words. That is an issue so severe, if it were going on in the US, my only reasonable prediction would be another Great Depression. It is impossible to accurately relay how horrendously bad that is. That's 100× worse than any market in Florida - I am being completely literal with that. Their housing market is a ticking nuclear bomb

[sebastiandk]

Apart from being an absolute tragedy in progress financially/economically, I'm devastated at the thought of how much damage this has done to the environment, and how much raw materials which, today are in short supply, have been wasted.

[nolesfan]

A friend of mine is a landscape architect and he spent a lot of time working in China back 15 to 20 years ago. He told me this same story way back then. They continued to build cities when others remained unfinished and/or empty. He said it made no sense then either.

[archimedesbird]

They're treating modern concrete like NFTs...

[ericconnor]

I have spent my working life trying to reduce material wastage in my landscaping company, I am so careful to recycle everything. If I dismantle a wall I clean the bricks and reuse them. If I leave half a bag of cement to go hard I feel guilty. Seeing this is heart breaking. No wonder we are running short of resources if this is how they are being used. There is not an infinite amount of building sand available.

[tronentertainment]

For a country which struggles to feed their population, I find it utterly disgusting they take away farmland, or build on potential farmland.

[MorrisOnions]

We took the high speed train from Beijing to Xian a couple of years ago, a 1200 km trip, took about 6 hours.
I was amazed at how many of these huge apartment blocks we passed along the way.

[eltonjohnson]

In the state I live in in the US, you're taxed or penalized if you let properties go vacant like this.

[TheSterlingArcher]

Damn I never realized how unbelievably speculative this was in China. Bubbles can be sustained for a given time, but eventually an investment has to be supported by it’s intrinsic worth. People paying hand over fist for empty concrete husks with nobody to live in them should send all the alarm bells ringing. It’s insane.

[aint_just_whistlin_dixie]

For your viewers who want to understand why these ghost cities keep being built, the person to read or listen to is Michael Pettis, professor of finance at Peking University’s Guanghua School of Management. One of his insights: whereas in most countries GDP is a measure of activity taking place in the private sector, in China GDP is a TARGET that the CCP sets every year. The provincial governments then have to meet that target. If organic growth coming from the private sector won't meet the target, the provinces then build these Potemkin villages financed by state bank loans. But China has enough infrastructure now, so the R.O.I. on these newer projects are often negative, but still count towards GDP.

The ideal solution would be for China to shift from being an investment led to a consumption-led economy like the U.S. but this is unlikely to happen for 2 reasons. One: this would require shifting capital towards households and away from the state. Translation: fewer opportunities for kickbacks and corruption for politicians/bureaucrats, and more power for entrepreneurs. Two: China is now the fastest aging society in history, with a population expected to cut in half by 2100. Most consumption takes place in the 25-49 age cohort, which will shrink drastically going forward.

Another interesting piece of info: in the US, if you invest in, say, a factory, but the factory goes bust, the loss is written down and subtracted from gdp statistics. In China, if said factory goes bust, the loss is not subtracted from GDP. This is often because bad loans are often rolled over into new loans rather than entered as a loss on the books. God only knows how much said accounting tricks factor in to China's GDP stats.

[LeaveNoTrashBehind]

That country looks beautiful, too bad the government has destroyed it.