Peering at China’s Ghostly GDP Quality

SBS Dateline, a TV program in Australia, is now featuring an investigation by Adrian Brown on residential and commercial ghost cities that continue to emerge in China. We’ve covered the South China Mall and Ordos Shi before, but the empty city of Zhengzhou New District in Henan, and the real estate developments of Daya Bay or Green Island, are new.

Both Chinese sociology professor Zhou Xiao Sheng and Hong Kong-based analyst Gillem Tulloch interviewed in the piece fear growing polarization between rich and poor. Should the China real estate bubble burst, they report, significant numbers of people will be impoverished, and the chance of social unrest or revolution, often considered the Chinese government’s biggest concern, will increase.

You can watch the video below, which came to our attention via a post on revisiting China’s ghost cities from The Mess That Greenspan Made.

The Daily Reckoning