that fact that we more empty homes degrading from abandonment into nothingness in this country than homeless people is surest sign that we have terrible system.
Not sure which country you’re referring to.
In September 2023, He Keng, a former deputy head of the National Bureau of Statistics, said that unfinished and finished-but-vacant apartment projects in China could conceivably house the entire Chinese population of 1.4 billion. (1)
there are more vacant homes that homeless people in my country and that fact is so incendiary to our sensibilities that it enshitifies things like google so; when you look up this fact; all of the results are going to lead you to explanations as to why it’s misleading and that there aren’t enough “appropriate” homes for homeless people.
all of the articles are hoping couch the unspoken classism divisions as “nuanced arguments” so when they say that there aren’t enough “appropriate” homes for homeless people; it’s dog-whistle-implying that homeless people don’t deserve the same desirable homes that can earn profit for the capitalists and that it’s the state’s responsibility to “deal” with them; amongst other dog whistles.
And what’s China’s homelessness statistics especially compared to the US?
Can you please share links to China’s homelessness statistics? Maybe my search engine is junk because I’m struggling to find any information later than 2011 (before some of the efforts to reduce it).
In 2024, home ownership in China is 93%, where in the US it is 65%.
https://peoplesdispatch.org/2023/07/10/why-are-there-no-slums-in-china/
How does the Chinese government deal with homelessness?
In the early 2000s, the issues of residential status, rights of migrant workers, and treatment of urban homeless people became a national matter. In 2003, the State Council – the highest executive organ of state power – issued the “Measures for the Rescue and Management of Itinerant and Homeless in Urban Areas”. The new regulation created urban relief stations providing food rations and temporary shelters, abolished the mandatory detention system of people without hukou status or housing, and placed the responsibility on the local authorities for finding housing for homeless people in their hometowns.
Under these measures, cities like Shanghai have set up relief stations for homeless people. When public security – the local police – and urban management officials encounter homeless people, they must assist them in accessing nearby relief stations. All costs are covered by the city’s fiscal budget. For example, the relief management station in Putuo District (with the fourth lowest per capita GDP of Shanghai’s 16 districts and a resident population of 1.24 million), provided shelter and relief to an average of 24.3 homeless people a month from June 2022 to April 2023, which could include repeated cases.
Relief stations provide homeless people with food and basic accommodations, help those who are seriously ill access healthcare, assist them to return to the locations of their household registration by contacting their relatives or the local government, and arrange free transportation home when needed.
Upon returning home, the local county-level government is responsible to help the homeless people, including contacting relatives for care and finding local employment. For a very small number of people who are elderly, have disabilities, or do not have relatives nor the ability to work, the local township people’s government, or the Party-run street office, will provide national support for them in accordance with the “method of providing for extremely impoverished persons”, which is stipulated in the 2014 “Interim Measures for Social Assistance”. The content of the support includes providing basic living conditions, giving care to impoverished individuals who cannot take care of themselves, providing treatment for diseases, and handling funeral affairs, etc.
This series of relief management measures ensure that administrative law enforcement personnel in the city do not simply expel homeless people from the city, but must guarantee that they receive proper assistance, in terms of housing, work, and support systems.
I don’t even know they care to report. I’m unaware
Why don’t you do that google thing you did for your previous comment?
Not sure what you mean. What’s google got to do with my previous comment?
google (verb):
- To search for (something) on the Internet using any comprehensive search engine.
Did you have the wikipedia page about the Chinese property sector crisis bookmarked?
No, I remembered reading about it. Then used google to find it again.
In my building, half the units are just sitting here empty. Guess what country the owner is from?
i’m happy to see the empty apartments where i live; it means that it helps drive down the cost of rent and it’s working, somewhat.
I’m guessing they’re empty because they can’t be rented, and not because they aren’t for rent.
it’s partially because there’s no one to rent it. the locals tell me that it’s trending towards the same patterns that i’ve experienced in other cities; but it still affordable compared to the cities i’ve lived in texas, new jersey and georgia and despite it being the 3rd largest city in the country and COMPLETELY outclassing those other cities in terms of quality of life and public services. (for now).
Wait, but is it in TEXAS?
Isn’t the housing situation significantly worse in China? You put entire down payments and then pay the mortgage for the house to still yet be built. And last year so many defaults happened that no houses were being built and no one was being returned their money when they wanted out.
The grass is not greener on their side. It’s still fucked, just a different fucked.
Those are the speculative houses xi is arguing against here. China doesn’t have involuntary homeless, that’s mainly why ‘ghost’ cities were built. Now the private housing market is fucked right now, and there’s a good chance there will never be privately built homes again in China. But that has nothing to do with the housing supply, and does not affect homeownership or housing rates
90% of families in China own their home, with 80% of these homes are owned outright. https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2016/03/30/how-people-in-china-afford-their-outrageously-expensive-homes
no, 0% of chinese own their home, it’s a lease from the state
You do know that every house belongs to the government in case of need, right? In every country (except maybe Somalia).
https://peoplesdispatch.org/2023/07/10/why-are-there-no-slums-in-china/
What is the “hukou” system and what does it have to do with socialism?
One unique characteristic of China’s urbanization process is that, although policies encouraged migration to cities for industrial and service jobs, rural residents never lost their access to land in the countryside. In the 1950s, the Communist Party of China (CPC) led a nationwide land reform process, abolishing private land ownership and transforming it into collective ownership. During the economic reform period, beginning in 1978, a “Household Responsibility System” (家庭联产承包责任制 jiātíng lián chǎn chéngbāo zérèn zhì) was created, which reallocated rural agricultural land into the hands of individual households. Though agricultural production was deeply impacted, collective land ownership remained and land was never privatized.
Today, China has one of the highest homeownership rates in the world, surpassing 90 percent, and this includes the millions of migrant workers who rent homes in other cities. This means that when encountering economic troubles, such as unemployment, urban migrant workers can return to their hometowns, where they own a home, can engage in agricultural production, and search for work locally. This structural buffer plays a critical role in absorbing the impacts of major economic and social crises. For example, during the 2008 global financial crisis, China’s export-oriented economy, especially of manufactured goods, was severely hit, causing about 30 million migrant workers to lose their jobs. Similarly, during the COVID-19 pandemic, when service and manufacturing jobs were seriously impacted, many migrant workers returned to their homes and land in the countryside.
Beyond land reform, a system was created to manage the mass migration of people from the countryside to the cities, to ensure that the movement of people aligned with the national planning needs of such a populous country. Though China has had some form of migration restriction for over 2,000 years, in the late 1950s, the country established a new “household registration system” (户口 or hùkǒu) to regulate rural-to-urban migration. Every Chinese person has an assigned urban or rural hukou status that grants them access to social welfare benefits (subsidized public housing, education, health care, pension, and unemployment insurance, etc.) in their hometown, but which are restricted in the cities they move to for work. While reformation of the hukou system is ongoing, the lack of urban hukou status forces many migrant parents to spend long periods away from their families and they must leave their children in their grandparents’ care in their hometowns, referred to as “left-behind children” (留守儿童 liúshǒu értóng). Though the number has been decreasing over the years, there are still an estimated seven million children in this situation. Today, 65.22 percent of China’s population lives in cities, but only 45.4 percent have urban hukou. Although this system deterred the creation of large urban slums, it also reinforced serious inequities of social welfare between urban and rural areas, and between residents within a city based on their hukou status.
can you point to the law that says that?
they’re made to last 50 years. Expensive houses are falling apart
Removed by mod
It would be great if we had laws which stopped people from doing that (both our own citizens and foreign). I want landleeches to scatter from here just like they did from China. No home for house hoarders.
doesn’t take much to get that racism to pop out, does it?
Fewer and fewer all the time, western propaganda regurgitater. China has been cracking down on the leeches (Billionaires) in their country.
But ze jobs creators, illiberalism!
Didn’t China just had a huge crisis in the property market?
Property speculation crashed. It wasn’t a homelessness crisis, but an intentional popping of a speculative bubble because Capitalists got greedy and homes were too expensive.
So China tried the same formula as the west than, let the capitalists steer the housing market?
It seems they overbuilt on purpose, which seems like a great idea if you care more about shelter for the population than the financial wellbeing of the speculators.
Is there any data on homelessness in China? There’s entire cities built and standing empty so I suppose there could potentially be zero homeless people, but if they were built by capitalists than I suppose it wouldn’t be surprising if it followed the same pattern as in the west, with empty homes for people can’t afford?
Not really, the government wound down the real estate market intentionally to refocus the economy on tech and industry.
Ah okey, so they acted on a non-issue than?
They acted to prevent an issue from developing. This is the whole purpose of having a government. It pays attention to what’s happening in the country overall, and guides the economy towards positive outcomes.
Im not sure we should be listening to this guy of all people, but i cosign the message still
I wonder how many houses this guy own
What an odd thing to wonder. Do you see Chinese state functionaries tooling around the world in megayachts?
Wasn’t there a huge scandal with Evergrande surrounding just how much of Chinese requirements were tied to real estate? Doesn’t that directly contradict what Xi saying here?
Not to mention, China has its own homeless problem - let’s not act like they’re doing so much better.
Wasn’t there a huge scandal with Evergrande surrounding just how much of Chinese requirements were tied to real estate?
Yes, which is why the Chinese state intentionally popped the real estate bubble and left the capitalists out to dry.
- Reuters: China Evergrande ordered to liquidate in landmark moment for crisis-hit sector
- Bloomberg: China Reiterates Stance That Homes Are Not for Speculation
- CNBC: China’s housing minister says real estate developers must go bankrupt if necessary
.
“We will scale up the building and supply of government-subsidized housing and improve the basic systems for commodity housing to meet people’s essential need for a home to live in and their different demands for better housing,” an English-language version of the report said.
Compare that to Obama, who bailed out the private banks at the expense of people with home mortgages, banks that knowingly wrote those bad mortgages. Michael Hudson, 2023: Why the Bank Crisis isn’t Over
The financial sector is the core of Democratic Party support, and the party leadership is loyal to its supporters. As President Obama told the bankers who worried that he might follow through on his campaign promises to write down mortgage debts to realistic market valuations in order to enable exploited junk-mortgage clients to remain in their homes, “I’m the only one between you [the bankers visiting the White House] and the mob with the pitchforks,” that is, his characterization of voters who believed his “hope and change” patter talk.
The Federal Reserve is just the cartel of the US private banks, whereas banking in China is predominantly state owned. The Chinese state both runs these banks and has fiat monetary sovereignty, so it’s not answerable to the capitalists like the US is.
Bonus info on fiat monetary sovereignty: Why The Government Has Infinite Money
Not to mention, China has its own homeless problem - let’s not act like they’re doing so much better.
[Citation needed]
China is the second country in the world by number of billionares. In europe cinese businessmen with ties to the government have been buying football clubs and luxury shit for a decade.
Unlike in capitalist states[1][2], the Chinese billionaires don’t run the Chinese state[3][4].
Wow that website! The way it does the links to references as you scroll is so responsive and smooth. EDIT: This is an amazing read, thank you for sharing this!
Marxists do be extremely particular, haha
A “curious approach on billionares” sound much like billionares apologia to me. China has greedy vermin billionares like the rest of the world. A quick search for “chinese megayachts” will show what you are looking for.
A “curious approach on billionares” sound much like billionares apologia to me.
Since you’re not going to actually read it, I guess you’ll never know.
A quick search for “chinese megayachts” will show what you are looking for.
I didn’t say there aren’t billionaires with megayachts, I said, “Do you see Chinese state functionaries tooling around the world in megayachts?”
And i didn’t ask how many megayachts the guy own i asked how many houses he own. You don’t really get to see state functionaries of any state tooling around in megayachts because they all try to keep a low profile, see putin and his proxy yachts.
They aren’t perfect, and as stated elsewhere they are in a period of Dengist based socialism. However, they are extremely successful, very popular within their country from all sources that could be called evidence (especially compared to the US government), and do far less to acquiesce to the billionaires compared to West, seemingly (charging and sentencing billionaires for corruption, cracking down on financiers, etc). I think another user had a good point too about looking at the amount they have per capital.
They are the most successful nation practicing a form of socialism in the modern world and offering an alternative to liberal capitalism.
There’s a reason it’s called critical support.
They’re something like #53 in billionaires per capita
But they aren’t buying them in china so it doesn’t count. ;)
In china they are probably buying chinese football teams and skyscrapers, i don’t live there.
Those are parks and monuments, they aren’t meant to be occupied silly ;)
What does a house have to do with a yacht though? Not everyone sails the open seas.
Seems to me that the fact that 90% of families in China own their home, with 80% of these homes are owned outright is a more important thing to focus on. That’s just me though.
Socialism is not a battle between america and china. Who owns skyscraper in china?
Socialism is a transitional period where the working class holds power in society, but capitalist relations have not yet been abolished. https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3228-lenin-s-three-theoretical-arguments-about-the-dictatorship-of-the-proletariat
I wouldn’t define socialism as just a period of time
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism
I’m wondering about how many houses own the state leader that comes out with the quote “houses are not for speculation”
Socialism isn’t a period of time, it’s a stage of development. Meanwhile, you’re making some claim about how many houses Xi owns, so it’s on you to tell us.
The guy linked a Wikipedia article on Socialism after you sent him to Verso Books. The brain is so smooth on that one.
you can always tell when people get all their political views from wikipedia 😆
Wikipedia is a good source for history. The page on socialism contains the major key events and enough cross links, the history section for example redirects to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_socialism
Socialism isn’t a period of time, it’s a stage of development.
I encourage you to study more history and not just a specific period of time.
I encourage you to take your own advice and actually study instead of skimming wikipedia. You can start by studying the verso link I gave you earlier.
You’re far out of your depth if you are linking the Wiki article on “Socialism” to a Marxist that is recommending a synopsis on Lenin to you.
If you want something a bit easier to get into than Lenin, I really like the article What is Socialism? It’s a quick, 30 minute read. The gist of the article is that Socialism is about what is dominant within a system, in Socialism central planning, public ownership, and the proletariat at large are dominant, while in Capitalism the bourgeoisie, private ownership, and markets are dominant.
In the PRC, the public sector makes up half of the economy and is growing, and Capital is trapped in a bidcage model while markets coalesce into monopolist syndicates, making themselves ripe for public ownership and central planning. The PRC is therefore Socialist.
You’re far out of your depth if you are linking the Wiki article on “Socialism” to a Marxist that is recommending a synopsis on Lenin to you.
Read the link, socialism date way before Lenin and it’s not a political party.
Read the link, everyone knows that. You don’t have a grand trump card in the wiki link. We are specifically referring to Marxist Socialism, not the nebulous historical usage of the term, because we are on a Marxist community.
