He Keng, the former deputy director of the statistics office, has made a rare public criticism of China’s crisis-hit property market, stating that even the country’s population of 1.4 billion would not be enough to fill all the empty apartments scattered throughout the country, according to CNN.
At the end of August, the total area of unsold housing reached 648 million square meters, according to the latest data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).
Based on calculations by Reuters, this would be equivalent to 7.2 million homes, assuming an average size of 90 square meters per home.
These figures do not take into account numerous residential projects that have already been sold but remain unfinished due to cash flow problems, or the many homes purchased by speculators during the market’s previous rebound in 2016 that are currently vacant. Together, these properties represent the bulk of the unused space, estimated by experts.
“How many vacant homes are there now? Every expert gives a very different number, with the most extreme view suggesting that the current number of vacant homes is enough to accommodate 3 billion people. This estimate may be a bit too high, but 1.4 billion people probably can’t fill them all,” said He Keng at a forum in the city of Dongguan in southern China.
Once the pillar of the economy, China’s real estate sector has collapsed since 2021 when the property giant China Evergrande Group defaulted on its debt payments following a drastic measure to restrict new loans, according to News.ro.
Even prominent developers such as Country Garden Holdings are currently on the brink of default.
The opinion of the former official sharply contrasts with official statements claiming that the Chinese economy is “resilient.”
“All sorts of comments predicting the collapse of China’s economy continue to appear from time to time, but what has collapsed is such rhetoric, not the Chinese economy,” said a spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs at a recent press conference.
PHOTO: Profimedia
