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).