Originally posted by @Eric Bilderback:
God speed @Genny Li
The Cultural Revolution is as terrifying as anything in all of history which is saying quite a lot. It is not by coincidence that our kids or adults for that matter no so little if anything about it, the Uyghurs, or organ harvesting.
Take down the CCP baby!
My mother-in-law has fond memories of being in the Red Guard and dragging people out of their houses and beating them on the streets. She got sent to the farms in the Red Guard crackdown the next year, and she still feels bitter about how unappreciative the CCP became of her loyal and patriotic efforts. Gives every appearance of being the sweetest little old Chinese lady, too. If you wonder how ordinary people do horrible things, well...I don't.
She also was assigned to the 1975 Banqiao Dam collapse clean up effort. 230,000 people dead. She had no idea more than a few had died (as it was enormously hushed up). Just wait until the Three Gorges Dam goes. They're still not doing anything to fix it, except force Google to alter the Google Earth images so you can't track the progress of the failure anymore.
On the property front, the Chinese property situation started with the typical government-seizes-everything. Ancient family homes were partitioned and poor families moved in. Soviet-style blocks were built, but without even private baths of any sort--those had to be traveled to--and no hot water whatsoever.
What's happening now is that the tofu dreg building projects are pretty much the only thing that Chinese people can invest in, even though all purchases are actually just temporary since the land they are built on reverts to the government 70 years after the sale. (The government promises not to repossess any building that meets the building codes after 70 years. Can you hear me cackling like a lunatic at the idea of a modern Chinese residential building lasting 70 years? If you can't, you probably haven't been to China.)
Regular people can't invest in a business in China. Someone with better connections than you will likely take you for a ride--push you out of the company and steal it from you, if it's worth stealing. You can't invest in the stock market. Most of the financials are fabricated, and everything is a soap bubble, like the Chinese bike rental scam businesses that really existed to make money for the owners. No one trusts the RMB. So the only thing that's left is property.
This means that everyone who has any money wants to buy property. The CCP loves this because it can inflate its GDP and keep up employment by paying people to build empty apartment blocks and even entire ghost cities. While the CCP originally planned for the ghost cities to be inhabited, having them as essentially a GDP/employment bolstering device works, too. In any ghost city, almost every unit is actually owned by some investor. It's a game of hot potato, because with the demand for housing, you can always get more out of a property than you bought it for...until suddenly it's worthless and you can't, because it's literally falling apart.
This has worked as a ratchet on prices for property in China, such that in many not-very-desirable areas in the Chinese cities with employment, a small apartment can be $200k-$500k, where people on average are only making $5k per year!!!! This happened because of entire families with single children cooperating together across generations to keep buying "better"/more expensive properties, churning through them and dropping more money in with each flip up. It's worse than you think, though, because the building standards are absolutely horrific and the developer abandons the property the moment it can get away with it, and the common areas and structural components are not kept up by anyone. Elevators killing people is a daily occurrence in China's cities. It only gets headlines when it's something like a lady's head getting chopped off in a hospital as she was being transported on a gurney. (True story.)
Worse still, if your family couldn't get in early on this ratcheting process, you're now shut out. Traditionally, a man is not considered marriageable until he own a house/apartment (skipping the true commie era when no one owned anything), so the desperation to get into buying is really high. If you don't OWN a property in a city, and you are farmer-class and not city-class, your children cannot go to the public city schools but have to go to your birth county. But there are no jobs in your birth county, so parents who are farmer-class and can't get city-class residency have to send their own children to be raised by grandparents still in the farmer birth county. It's horrific and a major reason why the Chinese birthrate is still plummeting despite the 3-child policy. The special economic districts in the city-tier system means that there can be no economic opportunities in the countryside. They don't exist, and you can't make them.
Knowing what a bad deal they're locked into, Chinese investors who have successfully acquired extra property then look overseas, and they cash out in China to leave someone else with the hot potato and buy up property in HK (before recent events), Australia, Canada, and some cities in the US without many black people (mainland Chinese investors hate buying in areas with black people). They cause massive housing inflation there, too, and also have many homes that are simply sitting empty, as they often don't even rent them out. Traditional mainland Chinese people are also not yet accustomed to the idea of maintenance. In ancient Chinese homes, there was practically no maintenance that was done. A house, temple, or palace was built, it stayed until it was rotting around your ears, and then you tore down the bad parts and rebuilt it. (Houses were still considered temporary in this way in Japan until very recently, and in medieval Europe, most peasant housing was also temporary and rebuilt on average every 30 years, so this isn't really a strange thing.) In that way, a house was often both "new" and "ancient" at the same time, because it still counted as ancient if it was built in the same spot (like the Great Wall of China, the stone parts of which weren't built that way until the time of Elizabeth I in England!).
So there is a serious problem with mainland Chinese investors buying up inventory, driving up prices, and then really neglecting the properties that they do own to the point that they're becoming derelict. Most Chinese who move to the US or Australia get the hang of maintenance eventually or else keep moving to new homes every 15 years, but the overseas investors don't have the cultural exposure and don't make the transition.
This is a part of the housing price bubble that's important to understand in places like Vancouver and Melbourne, but it does affect the West Coast and certain select parts of the East Coast of the US, too. Massive essay, but this is how bizarre things can become!
