China is continuing to grapple with a crisis in the property market with millions of homes remaining vacant.
On Saturday, September 23, the former official alleged that even China’s population of 1.4 billion would not be enough to fill all the empty apartments littered across the country.
The slump in the property market began in 2021 when real estate giant China Evergrande Group defaulted on its debt obligations following a clampdown on new borrowing.
The latest data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) showed as of the end of August, the combined floor area of unsold homes stood at 648 million square meters (7 billion square feet).
“How many vacant homes are there now? Each expert gives a very different number, with the most extreme believing the current number of vacant homes are enough for 3 billion people,” stated He Keng, 81, a former deputy head of the statistics bureau.
“That estimate might be a bit much, but 1.4 billion people probably can’t fill them,” He added at a forum in the southern Chinese city Dongguan, according to a video released by the official media China News Service.
His negative view of the economically significant sector at a public forum stood in sharp contrast to the official narrative that the Chinese economy was resilient.
“All sorts of comments predicting the collapse of China’s economy keep surfacing every now and then, but what has collapsed is such rhetoric, not China’s economy,” a spokesperson at the foreign ministry said at a recent news conference.
However, China is engaging other development partners to keep its economy stable despite shakedown and fears of recession.
In recent weeks, the central bank made its biggest interest rate cut in three years. The regulators reduced the stamp duty on stock transactions for the first time since 2008, and banks are poised to lower interest rates on existing mortgages.
