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Are NEW Chinese buildings really FALLING DOWN?

ADVChina
Documentaries
YouTube
2 HN users recommended this documentary2 months2018–2023 score 2
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

HN commenters cite it in threads on China's housing glut and construction quality as visual evidence of poor, empty new buildings.

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.

“This video from last year was pretty eye opening to me.” (HN, 2019)

2 recommendations · 9 citations · Documentaries · partly dated

11 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@ajflores1604 Jul 2019 Recommends
on HN thread China’s State-Driven Growth Model Is Running Out of Gas
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]
Uninhabited new ghost cities crumbling.

Citations, criticism and jokes

@FooHentai Jan 2019 Cites it
on HN thread A Fifth of China’s Homes Are Empty (2018)
Read more
"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".
Follow-up showing new Chinese buildings deteriorating.
@toomuchtodo Feb 2019 Cites it
on HN thread China's housing glut casts pall over the economy
These are concrete structures, 20 stories tall, that are collapsing in less than a decade. This isn't a case of lack of maintenance, but poor construction trying to goose GDP. [this video]
Shows 20-story concrete buildings collapsing within a decade.
@reaperducer Apr 2019 Cites it
on HN thread Construction has kept rent in Chongqing, China to $75 a month
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted. The construction quality in mainland China is terrible. I've witnessed a lot of it, myself, but this video was posted on HN a couple of days ago: [this video] As bad as that is, it only scratches the surface because they didn't actually go inside any of the buildings. It would be unimaginable for a building outside of the Chinese bubble to literally start collapsing upon itself after standing on its own for only three years.
Shows Chinese buildings deteriorating after three years.
@pas May 2019 Cites it
on HN thread Study Pinpoints Source of Banned Gas That Saps Ozone Layer: Eastern China
Read more
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)
@justaman Dec 2020 Cites it
on HN thread How the CCP Does Job Promotions
Here is video of a Chinese ghost city. It was made by a bloggers that were forced to leave the country for fear of their lives. [this video] > At every level, there is total abdication of responsibility. The whole system incentivizes this. Exactly like the USSR and Chernobyl.
@jollybean Sep 2021 Cites it
on HN thread Societies that treat women badly are poorer and less stable
Read more
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
@toomuchtodo Sep 2021 Cites it
on HN thread China Evergrande contagion concerns rile global markets
Bit of a hot take. While there are some buildings in the US where substandard construction are going to catch up to the building and the owners, shoddy construction is endemic in China (or buildings are left unfinished and eventually need to be retired before completion). [link] [this video] [link]

Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.

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