China has a ton of real state that is not being used right now because they misscalculated bigly their demographical expectations it seems. I think they just thought people would have tons of kids in the future, but they didn't for whatever reason, and so what you get now is entire cities that are empty.
the main reason to have miscalculated the birthrate growth expectation is because although they relaxed the one child policy in 2015. adults in 2015 were already culterally indocrinated deacde before to only have one child. so its engrained into their ethos by the time they reached adulthood.
so the desire to want multiple kids is already trained out of them
chinese politicians however didnt take that into account nor did real estate developers/investors. they instead thought adults in 2015+ would be popping out extra kids straight away by feeling more liberated..
then chinese government relaxed the 2 child policy trying to again make people feel liberated to pop more kids out.
however it would require the teenagers of school age in 2015 to be culterally liberated to feel that their future family decisions are more open. meaning someone thats under 12yr old in 2015 that feels liberated would not reach parenting age until well 2020's
so all those apartments built 2015-2020 just were not filling up
The bottomline is that there are simply ghost cities with few people living. But that doesn't mean China doesn't have massive leverage on exports. We are going to see what happens next month when tariff results start being felt by the west as less cargo ships filled with cheap goods arrive.
yes the ghost cities due to bad population growth predictions produced those... but now..active cities in the industrial zones are now getting hit due to this years trade deal stuff, which is causing more empty buildings ontop of the previous issue
there is mass exodus of industrialised cities. where some are moving to other countries to work in competing factories or when there are no jobs left even abroad, they return to their ancestral/parents villagers to work on farms or fishing in the rural area's