Empty Mansions, Empty Dreams: China Enters The “Last Generation”

The wind carries dust through the empty mansions in the ghost town in Shenyang, north of Beijing. Cattle roam the streets where upper-class residents were supposed to stroll. This is not unusual. In China some 65 million homes sit empty — victims of the real estate drive that underlay the country’s economy. In China, a number of walls are closing in — and they have nothing to do with external military competition. There was a time in Japan which people referred to as the “Lost Generation”; pundits in China are referring to their plight as the “Last Generation.” And nothing in this dark picture is anything for the West to celebrate, because a desperate China is not in anyone’s interests. First, the demographics is a nightmare. In the coming two decades its working-class population will drop to 773-million — China will lose a number of workers equal to the entire population of Brazil. The under-14 population is also going to fall, so there will be few people to replace the workers. Because of government policy — the one-child population control regulation — it has a dearth of women, and the women it does have seem to be disinclined to want children (two-thirds have expressed “low birth desire”). Fertility rates in Beijing and Shanghai have fallen to the lowest in the world. In parallel China has exaggerated school enrolment data for economic purposes; Jieshu City in Anui reported 50,000 students when the actual number was 36,000 — but money for educational subsidies is based on the number of students. A middle school in Hubei province reported 3,000 students but the real number was 700. <a href="https://barry-gander.medium.com/empty-mansions-empty-dreams-china-enters-the-last-generation-47edc1c9f22a">Learn More</a>