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.

  • 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.