This is how you pump up GDP numbers.

Why bother even putting up the buildings.

I wonder how much it has to do with ambitious real-estate / encouraging growth ... and maybe a little communist legacy of building massive blocks of apartments for housing.

Granted when I think of block after block of cookie cutter buildings I think of my travels in eastern Europe, maybe China had that tradition too?

China has moved 300 million people out of rural poverty, into nearly-first world lifestyles in the past 30 years.

At that rate of development, it would be a failure of planning to not have millions of empty units.

It's a failure of planning if those new units fall into disrepair before being rented.

Nowhere does it say the buildings are falling into disrepair.

On the other hand, if you would otherwise have high unemployment right now that can productively be channeled into construction that is less expensive to achieve, while you expect a massive influx of people in 15 years with a tight labor market... then it makes perfect economic sense to build out a decade in advance.

I'm not saying this is the case, but there are plenty of reasons why building in advance can make sense.

There's lot of videos of urban explorers who travel China looking for these places, and many of them are in complete disrepair. Even if you don't trust the CNN/NYT narrative, those are harder to discount.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8TbOPzpeKc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wuyRxc99h8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lL9qfucWqu0

haha that last video has a guy cycling through an indoor marble floor mall and a dog just casually wander in.

Chinese construction methods heavily use concrete and cheap low skilled labor, they have to overbuild significantly so that those buildings don’t fall apart. But this also means maintnence is a huge problem, a building that was “new” five years ago will often look very shabby today; if built 10 years ago the concrete is already crumbling in a few places. 20 years...tear it down and rebuild.

Can you elaborate on your second sentence? Are you referring to the empty rural homes that these people left behind?

I think they are saying that china needs to plan for more and more people moving into its cities. The buildings are empty now but maybe that's better than having a housing shortage in 15 years.

China has a rather unique ability compared to other major economies: they can do whatever they want to, anytime they want to.

If they need to move a million people from a location, they can just make it happen. This isn't San Francisco we're talking about, Chinese authorities can snap their fingers and dictate policy. They can point at an area and that's where the new expansion will go for the city. Zoning problems? Nope, it's all flexible depending on who wants something done.

There's no need to build so far in advance if you're China. They're front-loading economic activity, attempting to pull future returns forward. You can tell because the returns they generate on their debt has plunged drastically over the last decade. If they were still generating the old tremendous growth returns on their borrowing, it'd be a different story, then they'd be feeding growth. Instead, they're stealing from the future (which will have to pay for all of this low value forced expansion).

first, china has a population of 1.5b, compared to the US 20. So to get an idea of what the US equivalent of a building project would be, divide it by 5. Now observe as the rents in big US cities have grown unaffordable for a majority of people due to insufficient building, what China is doing is much better. Having too many apartments available for 20 years is good compared to having none.

Too bad those vacant buildings will all be uninhabitable within a couple years thanks to the lack of maintenance.

I'm curious about your reasons for browsing satellite images of Chinese cities. Are you looking for something in particular?

I’m interested in the China/global economy and this is one of the many data points.

Thanks for the reply and I hope it's okay if I ask some follow-up questions.

Are you doing some kind of manual sampling or have you automated parts of it? Also, what kinds of objects can be distinguished with the images you use? I assume it might require a bit of practice to reliably recognize certain kinds of structures.

Curiosity?