I have to agree with you on this even in 2018. I have been fortunate enough to travel to many places in the world and China definitely struck me as the most strange in terms of development.
I constantly hear about China being an econ powerhouse, the future of the world, everyone wants access to their huge middle class, etc. But for my one week visiting Beijing and Shanghai I was confused to say the least.
The most impactful thing I have ever seen was on the high speed train between Shanghai and Beijing (about 5 hours at 190 mph) and I have never seen more highrise apartments completely empty in my life. In fact, at some points, I would look out the window and see over 200 of the exact same highrise perfectly spaced and all very clearly empty. I would say a lower bound on the number of 20+ story apartments I saw in 5 hours is somewhere around 10,000. I could be off, but I was pretty attentive to it the entire ride. Most of them were empty(given the lack of any humans, vehicles, or clothes on the balcony around them).
The wildest thing was seeing some of these highrises plopped in the middle of a farm. Nothing around, not even a cement road, and just an unoccupied apartment, 20 floors tall, surrounded by fields of whatever crop it was.
I started to hypothesize that the massive construction SEO's in China were used to subsidize jobs for rural workers and nothing else. It seems like construction would be a good industry to try to bring lesser educated and rural populations to higher wealth due to the high need of labor. This is total speculation so please don't blast me, but it seems possible.
Anyways, I was shocked at seeing this and I wonder if anyone can add other anecdotal evidence of something like this in another Chinese region. The great wall was pretty cool though:)
I constantly hear about China being an econ powerhouse, the future of the world, everyone wants access to their huge middle class, etc. But for my one week visiting Beijing and Shanghai I was confused to say the least.
The most impactful thing I have ever seen was on the high speed train between Shanghai and Beijing (about 5 hours at 190 mph) and I have never seen more highrise apartments completely empty in my life. In fact, at some points, I would look out the window and see over 200 of the exact same highrise perfectly spaced and all very clearly empty. I would say a lower bound on the number of 20+ story apartments I saw in 5 hours is somewhere around 10,000. I could be off, but I was pretty attentive to it the entire ride. Most of them were empty(given the lack of any humans, vehicles, or clothes on the balcony around them).
The wildest thing was seeing some of these highrises plopped in the middle of a farm. Nothing around, not even a cement road, and just an unoccupied apartment, 20 floors tall, surrounded by fields of whatever crop it was.
I started to hypothesize that the massive construction SEO's in China were used to subsidize jobs for rural workers and nothing else. It seems like construction would be a good industry to try to bring lesser educated and rural populations to higher wealth due to the high need of labor. This is total speculation so please don't blast me, but it seems possible.
Anyways, I was shocked at seeing this and I wonder if anyone can add other anecdotal evidence of something like this in another Chinese region. The great wall was pretty cool though:)