From Market Oracle:
As in the United States, the Chinese real-estate market is plagued by overconstruction, and not just in megacities like Shanghai, Beijing, and Shenzhen. Brand-new ghost towns have sprung up all across China in recent years, the most famous of which is perhaps Kangbashi in Ordos, Inner Mongolia. That city’s housing capacity can currently accomodate well over 300,000 residents, yet only one tenth of that number actually live there. Numerous other lesser-known cities also boast swaths of high-rise apartments and majestic public buildings while appearing to be entirely devoid of residents.
Jim Chanos of Kynikos Associates claims that the new office space currently being constructed in China is enough to provide a five square-foot cubicle for every single citizen in the country. And that’s just corporate real estate. Finance Asia reports that some 64 million homes and apartments across China have sat empty for the past six months, enough to house 200 million people — 15 percent of the country’s entire population. Along the same lines, a study conducted in 2007 by the Beijing Union University found that 27 percent of all newly sold apartments in over 50 different residential areas in Beijing remained unoccupied.
