The State Guest Mansions are just a number of deserted developments scattered around China, an occurrence that speaks to a growing real estate crisis in the country. Nearby is an abandoned high-rise complex, which Jonathan Cheng, a reporter for the the Wall Street Journal, visited recently and documented in a video on the paper’s website. “This is just another of the residential property developments in Shenyang that have frozen in their tracks,” Cheng says, pointing at a collection of dozens of roughly 15-story buildings. With concrete frames and nonexistent windows, the buildings look like empty oversized brutalist doll houses, waiting for someone to come sprinkle life into their interiors.
But like a toy cast aside long after a child grows up, it’s unlikely that the project will get picked up again. The complex was developed by China Evergrande Group, the country’s biggest residential real estate developer, which filed for bankruptcy in August 2023. This January, a Hong Kong court ordered the company to liquidate, as it was unable to restructure the $300 billion that it owes to investors. According to the Wall Street Journal, about 800,000 of the company’s 1.2 million pre-sold units remain unfinished.
For decades, China’s economy was driven by real estate, so much so that the government often encouraged large-scale developments. But an aging population, affordability concerns, and the COVID-19 pandemic, among other factors, resulted in a supply-demand imbalance. The Chinese government has also been cracking down on developers’ reckless borrowing habits.
