The ghosts that haunt China's economic landscape

[steve2470]

http://behindthewall.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/07/13/12725483-the-ghosts-that-haunt-chinas-economic-landscape?chromedomain=worldnews&lite



SHANGHAI, China -- It can take two or three hours to drive from bustling Shanghai to the sleepy streets of Thames Town, a new housing development built in the style of an English village complete with quaint pubs, red telephone boxes and statues of Harry Potter and James Bond. There's even an Anglican Church, though not a functioning one.

All that's missing are the people.

Thames Town was completed in 2006, cost a billion dollars to build, and was designed as home for 10,000 people. But shops and restaurants are boarded up, their doors chained.

Thames Town is one of the more bizarre examples of the madness of a construction frenzy and real estate bubble that has left the country with an estimated sixty four million empty homes. It was fuelled by easy money and rapidly rising prices.

[Warpy]

1. This kind of shit happens when you make a huge bunch of money

but neglect to distribute it fairly among the people who made it for you. Instead of creating a strong consumer base for your products, you end up leveraging debt to put together an bunch of bullshit for other rich people.

Too bad rich people are in such short supply there, as here.

They wouldn't be if workers were paid fairly.

[jtuck004]

2. Dumb communists.Build a whole town and forget the people. Unlike our superior method,

wherein we create a whole town, stuff it full of people with lives and futures and opportunity, elect people who write laws for bankers to hide behind, let the bankers perpetuate a fraud which takes a weakened economy over the cliff, and watch as the lives millions of people invested years in building are destroyed.

Left over are vacant houses, city services that can't be paid for, broken community and empty blocks to bulldoze. But it's not as if they never got used.

Dumb communists.