Vegetable posted:

Isn’t Chinese Chess from China?

Horatius Bonar posted:

It writes itself!


Bad romance of the three kingdoms.

McGavin posted:

Post '90s Beauty and the Beast Rene Chang

shades of eternity posted:

I am looking forward to a news story that allows this thread to be called my chemical romance of the three kingdoms.

Atopian posted:

Based on the average rate this past decade, the city I live in is due another chemical plant explosion this year. I'll let you know.

Whenever it happens they come to bother me about chemical storage protocols, and I want to tell them "The reason you're able to bother me is because my stuff *hasn't* exploded. Again! Look at the walls and ceiling all existing and poo poo!"

It was funny the first time, but I've been through three cycles now.
Amusingly, each time was with a different employer in the same city, so the second two times the guy comes through the door, sees me, frowns, then sighs.
Although that is a fairly normal reactive people have to me even absent context.

ninjoatse.cx posted:

Roughly speaking, what kind of chemicals do you deal with? Other than 'splodey.

ninjoatse.cx posted:

Roughly speaking, what kind of chemicals do you deal with? Other than 'splodey.

Booty Pageant posted:

you need to sit them down in a chinese restaurant and then flick it on like it's casual 6 o'clock news, especially while they are eating and bonus points if it involves small children

McGavin posted:

Post '90s Beauty and the Beast Rene Chang

TheBuilder posted:

I miss China. I miss my Chinese friends, and I even miss my in-laws a little bit. I hate the way things are, and the sting of nostalgia hurts unbelievably. I hate the current environment.

Booty Pageant posted:

i miss going to the ikea next to the train station in guangzhou and getting dill pickled herring, i swear i was the only person getting that stuff

Ups_rail posted:

how many people were just sleeping on the furniture

ThisIsJohnWayne posted:

To bad they don't sell dill-boiled crayfish, that's the superior delicacy. Harder to put on a sandwich but easier to sing about

Ups_rail posted:

how many people were just sleeping on the furniture

Ailumao posted:

quote:

The average vacancy rate in mainland China is 12.1 per cent, according to BRI, meaning millions of empty units could flood the market
Now the property boom is over, the unoccupied homes are beginning to feel like a burden for their anxious owners
Liu Hong and her parents own four homes in different cities across mainland China. At any one time, as many as three of them are unoccupied.

The 36-year-old, who works as an auditor in Shanghai, bought a flat in her hometown of Harbin in northern Heilongjiang province 13 years ago for 320,000 yuan (US$47,500). It stands just two blocks away from her parents' place, which was given to her father for free by the school he taught at three decades ago - a common practice in mainland China at the time.

"My dad and mum insisted I should have my own home as they held the firm belief that I would someday go back and live in Harbin, or I might need it to save money before I get married," Liu said.

Do you have questions about the biggest topics and trends from around the world? Get the answers with SCMP Knowledge, our new platform of curated content with explainers, FAQs, analyses and infographics brought to you by our award-winning team.

"Neither of those things happened, and now for half of the year my parents stay with me in Shanghai after they both retired."

Liu bought herself a two-bedroom apartment in Shanghai for 2.6 million yuan when the market was sizzling in 2015, after deciding to settle down in the city.

When both Harbin and Shanghai are too cold, between October and April, her parents travel to Haikou, in southern China's Hainan province, where they own a small holiday home.

"It is not easy to find a tenant or buyer in Harbin. So we just leave our old apartments there, empty for years. Theoretically, our family alone has two or three homes no one stays in throughout the year," Liu said.

The family's situation is far from unique. By most estimates, there are tens of millions of flats sitting empty in mainland China.

This is likely to prove problematic for China's already troubled housing market as a potential glut of vacant homes threatens to further undermine prices.

"China does not lack homes, with plenty sitting empty, and such high vacancy is risky," warned the Beike Research Institute (BRI), a Chinese property think tank, in its latest study.

"Empty homes represent a large potential supply. When expectations for the housing market turn sour, a large chunk of empty homes will be put onto the market and could weigh further on the downward pressure on home prices."

scmp
© Provided by South China Morning Post
scmp
The average vacancy rate across mainland China is 12.1 per cent, according to BRI's report, released earlier this month. That compares with 11.1 per cent in the US and 9.8 per cent in Australia, and is far higher than in the UK, where only 0.9 per cent of houses are empty.

The rate translates to some 50 million unoccupied flats, if applied to a study last year by the economist Ren Zeping, formerly of the Development Research Center. By adding his his estimate made in 2020 to official figures for the number of houses built to completion since then, there are about 400 million homes in mainland China.

That eye-watering number is roughly 16 times the total number of homes - both occupied and empty - in Hong Kong.

Capital Economics, a research and consultancy firm based in London, would put the number far higher still. It estimated last year that mainland China was host to about 30 million unsold properties, while about 100 million more were likely to have been bought but not occupied.

All of this is bad news for Liu and others like her. Homeowners across China may find it difficult to find buyers to take on their empty units as the boom era for the housing market runs out of steam.

"Some vacant houses are the residue of the overheated period between 2016 to 2018 when people flocked to buy houses for investment," said Sunshine Li, a real estate agent in Nanchang, the capital city of eastern Jiangxi province.

About a fifth of the homes in Nanchang are unoccupied, putting it in first place among the 28 major cities that BRI monitored.

The report, and in particular the ranking of cities, triggered fierce debate on social media. Nanchang residents responded angrily on Weibo, China's equivalent of Twitter, declaring that they definitely do not have the most vacant homes.

Such was the backlash that BRI issued an apology on its WeChat account at midnight of August 11, saying its research procedures may not have been "rigorous enough" and promising to cross-check its figures with local authorities to deliver a more accurate report.

Whatever the discrepancies between individual cities, the fact there are millions of homes gathering dust across the country is beyond doubt.

Feng He, 26, a middle-school teacher, said her family owns a three-story, semi-detached house in Kunshan, a city in coastal Jiangsu province, that has been sitting idle since 2017. It is being saved both as a retirement home for her parents and an investment for herself.

"It feels secure to have them, and if any [financial] uncertainty happens in the future, you can exchange the property for money," said Feng.

As an only child, she believes she will eventually take over all four properties under her family's name, including the 4 million-yuan luxury house standing empty in Kunshan.

For years, people like Liu and Feng and their families worshipped at the altar of property, generally referred to as Zhuan Tou, or bricks, in China, driving home prices up 2.5 times over the past decade alone.

Our old apartment in Harbin has not received a single inquiry so far this year
Liu Hong
They believed it would do no harm to buy an extra home at any time in any place, even if they did not urgently require one.

But now the boom time is over, the unused houses are beginning to feel less like a blessing.

Liu's family are struggling to sell one of their vacant units.

"Our old apartment in Harbin has not received a single inquiry so far this year," she said.

The Chinese real estate sector is mired in gloom.

Some 21 major developers have defaulted on their unmanageable debts in the last year, most notably China Evergrande Group. Thousands of homebuyers staged a mortgage boycott last month, adding to the woes.

Faith in the sector is wearing thin as no clear and detailed bailout measures have been produced by the central government yet, despite enthusiastic promises to stabilise the housing market being trotted out over and over again.

S&P Global Ratings expects national property sales to fall by as much as a third from last year to between 12 trillion and 13 trillion yuan in 2022, while average home prices could end up 7 per cent lower.

None of this bodes well for anyone wanting to offload their unused properties.

"I am a bit worried that the [vacant units] might become a burden one day if we get stuck with these apartments for years and have to pay maintenance fees and tax," said Liu.

Atopian posted:

Yeah.

A big problem is that for years, for anyone not rich enough to afford to invest overseas, the only real option for keeping savings up with inflation was housing.

And, local governments got a significant portion of their funding from development fees.

So, it's entirely understandable why excess housing should be built, and it's understandable why people bought it. But, problems.

Still, on the other hand, it could be worse. People with the money to spend on buying multiple houses aren't the ones worth crying an ocean of tears for, and I suspect that the government here will have more forceful ideas about what to do with it all other than "urban decay lol".

Meme Poker Party posted:

I am declaring war on China.

Meme Poker Party posted:

I am declaring war on China.

Meme Poker Party posted:

I am picking quarrels with China.

Ups_rail posted:

https://www.msn.com/en-xl/money/oth...ank/ar-AA10DzRP

McGavin posted:

Why does Japan have so many vacant houses? Population decline?

Stink Billyums posted:

that will be a major factor in the future but right now it's mostly young people leaving rural areas. 20 years ago the urban/rural distribution was 80/20 and now it's 92/8.

Meme Poker Party posted:

Does this mean I can buy a house in rural Japan?