this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2025
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Its always funny liberals who try to tell me this is a sign that things in China are going badly.
Like they have TOO much housing, rents are TOO low.
It shows there aspirations to be petite-lords and exposes there world view as parasitic to the core, things are only good for them when the higher classes can endlessly profit off of labour and its bad when things slide too far into the workers favour.
For the Hexbear post on this article the user Xiaohongshu wrote a long post claiming "local governments are the landlords", featuring their common talking points of local governments strained for cash after the real estate bubble burst and that Chinese economists are all neoliberals and therefore unable to solve this.
I've wanted to ask Lemmygrad's opinion on this user for a while. To what is their pessimism warranted in your view? Do you take issue with (their interpretation of) their observations?
That user is one of the more prominent chronic "doomers" over on Hexbear. They are knowledgeable but prone to exaggerating.
My take: If anything this makes it even better news, as those local governments will now have additional incentive to rethink their relationship with real estate and find alternative ways of structuring local financing. Necessity is the mother of invention. Economists don't make the political decisions, and material reality will assert itself over ideology anyway.
If local governments made bad bets that contradict the policy of the central government, which has repeatedly declared that housing is not for speculating on, has made it clear they wish to make housing affordable for everyone, and has deliberately but safely deflated the real estate bubble, then that is their problem and their responsibility to solve. If they don't they will be replaced by others who will.
The bottom line is this: where would you prefer to live? A country where housing prices are skyrocketing or a country where they are becoming more affordable? Everything else is just concern trolling. Especially when we see that this has not led to an economic downturn but the opposite, an expansion of manufacturing as investment is redirected from a non-productive (real estate) to a productive sector.
And if China critics' only response to pointing this out is to start throwing around the buzzword "overcapacity", then you know they've lost the argument, because that's just cope. No, China does not need to transition to a western style consumption driven model, why in the world would they adopt a system that is clearly seen by the entire world to be failing before our eyes? They would have to be incredibly stupid to do so.
also prone to outright lying