ADVChina
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 9 months, 2018–2023
11:04 · 2.6M views · Jul 2, 2018
The ADVChina hosts tour a villa neighborhood in southern China that was built only three years earlier and is already empty and deteriorating. They use it to discuss ghost cities, building quality and the real estate bubble.
HN commenters cite it in threads on China's housing glut and construction quality as visual evidence of poor, empty new buildings.
11 comments from Hacker News
This video from last year was pretty eye opening to me. Shows uninhabited "new" ghost cities completely crumbling. There's no underlying value to the property bubble going on over there and the scale seems mind blowing. this video
ADV China youtube channel has covered this with some great video of new construction problems in China (not implying the problem is only there): this video
I'm sorry that you're not aware of the reality of total lack of quality in many products and services in China, which is partly due to a function of lower costing, but also due to a general lack of industrial focus on quality, and particularly a lack of standards. And then gaslight others for pointing out the facts ... I work for a company that sells an electrical device, which has considerable standards applied in Europe and North America, and basically none in China. The competitive products to ours in China are essentially dangerous. They will start fires. We manufacture in China, and depending on the manufacturer, can usually make no assumptions about quality, other than it will be the lowest possible unless there is considerable oversight. Unbelievable, 'shocking' hacks and cutting corners, which we view as a matter of quality, they view as a matter of cost reduction. With the bigger factories that do business with big established brands, that's less of a problem because they're consistently building for markets with higher standards and requirements. For some thoughts on Food Safety [1][2] In China, in the year 2000, only 50% of the population had 'basic sanitation' services i.e. toilets. That's changed a lot, but there are still wide swaths of population literally without basic sanitation. The number is effectively 100% in almost every other semi-developed country. [3]. Even in 2015, 5% of the country still does not have access to basic water. [4] Chinese construction
State socialism/communism. Everything is provided, decided, controlled, influenced, reviewed, rethought by and via the state (in some representation, the party, the government, the local government, some group or other, an official, someone with connections, the police, or even just a faceless automated system/website/machine). This reminds people that everything is temporary, effort is futile, etc. This makes people simply not care much about common stuff. (Environment, roads, streets, houses, etc.) Source, I'm from a post-soviet country, and we're dealing with huge swaths of the population who are still very much thinking like this. See also: - [LINK] (why everything is falling apart) - this video (what about new buildings, quality, maintenance?) - [LINK] (about powerlessness, apathy)
"Immediately above us towered what could have been the headquarters of a bank — forty floors of office space, wrapped in a shell of mirrored panels. In its un-maintained state however, these reflective scales were falling away in great swathes, to expose the bare concrete beneath. Not even finished yet, and already it needed a makeover." [LINK] "the farmers that own the land here get the cheapest materials, and make these pop up out of nowhere": [LINK] Follow-up video "Are new chinese buildings really falling down?": this video tl;dr yes. Note at 2:30 "We saw this place being built three years ago".