China's Problems Driven Underground?

In a Beijing suburb, beneath one of the thousands of faceless residential tower blocks that have carpeted the city's peripheries in a decade-long building frenzy, one of Beijing's "bomb shelter hoteliers", as they are known, agrees to show us his wares.

...There, in the city's vast network of unused air defence bunkers, as many as a million people live in small, windowless rooms that rent for £30 to £50 a month, which is as much as many of the city's army of migrant labourers can afford. _Telegraph

In a real estate bubble of epic proportions, China's upward-spiraling property prices are driving a million low income residents underground, and millions of others into squalor. In the quest to puff up China's economic numbers, the corrupt CCP is making life a misery for many tens of millions of ambitious, intelligent, hard-working people who deserve a more honest and trustworthy government.

Beijing is estimated to have 30 square miles of tunnels and basements, some constructed after the Sino-Soviet split of 1969, when Mao's China feared a Soviet missile strike, and many more constructed since to act as more modern emergency refuges. _Telegraph

Images are courtesy of Impactlab

The fact Mr Zhao can easily rent out 150 such rooms, with the connivance of the city's Civil Defence Bureau with whom he has signed a five-year contract and invested nearly £150,000, is testament to China's massive unfulfilled demand for affordable housing.

"Some 80pc of our tenants are girls working in the wholesale market and the rest are peddlers selling vegetables or running sidewalk snack booths," he adds. "There are dozens of similar air defence basement projects in residential communities. In this area, they say 100,000 live underground."

Checking out the price of property above ground it is not difficult to see why. To buy a small flat (860 sq ft) in the tower block above – a typically grim, grey concrete affair – currently costs more than £200,000. In a city where the average monthly salary is 4,000 yuan, the average person would take 50 years to buy such an apartment, assuming they saved every penny they earned.
_Telegraph_via_ImpactLab

There are plenty of empty residential buildings -- enough empty space for as many as 50 to 100 million people, according to some accounts. Of course, many of those buildings were built using substandard materials and practises -- courtesy of corrupt government inspectors and officials. The high prices do not reflect the likelihood of very short lifetimes for much of China's construction.