At a national conference on housing and urban-rural construction held on December 21, Chinese Communist Party officials announced that as of last year, the “per capita housing floor area” of urban and rural residents in China reached 39.8 square meters and 48.9 square meters respectively, drawing angry comments from netizens.
Wang Menghui, minister of the Ministry of Housing and Construction, released these figures at the conference and claimed that the authorities had promoted the renewal of 39,700 communities between January and November this year, affecting a total of 7.25 million households, and expected to continue to promote renewal next year.
Wang Meng Hui also concluded that China has made “historic new achievements” for the 13th Five-Year Plan, which runs from 2016 to 2020.
Many netizens saw the new official data and left angry sarcastic comments, saying “they were averaged out again”.
“Sorry, I’m the one pulling down” “39 square meters per capita in the city! Another drag! It is the corrupt officials corrupt room to my head!” “Water injection is right” “Does it make sense? It’s even more boring than the average price of house prices in big cities, using distant suburbs to average urban areas and all towns to average big cities.”
Official Communist Party figures often have no real meaning. These messages are almost identical to the reaction of the private sector when the CCP officially announced in January this year that China’s GDP per capita had exceeded $10,000 for the first time. At that time, too, a large number of netizens exclaimed, “I’m holding the country back?” “This is counting the income of corrupt officials on my head!”
Looking further back, back in 2015 around the time of China’s stock market crash, Zhu Guangyao, vice minister of the Communist Party of China’s Ministry of Finance, let it be known that China’s economy was stabilizing and improving, and that per capita GDP would reach $10,000 by 2020. Netizens instantly left comments saying, “Great Leap Forward 2.0? In this country of extreme polarization, the average is meaningless. The median still makes sense.”
Observers have commented that the word “per capita” itself is full of irony in a country like China, where there is a wide gap between the rich and the poor.
The official “39 square meters of housing area per capita” figure from the Chinese Communist Party says that, according to the official figure, the housing area for a family of four in China should be about 156 square meters, yet even in second- and third-tier cities, based on 15,000 yuan (RMB, the same below) per square meter of housing to calculate, a 30-year-old young man who starts a 30-year portfolio A young man with a 60% loan would have to repay 6688 yuan a month to build a small family of his own.
Again, using the 2018 National Economic and Social Development Statistical Bulletin released by the National Bureau of Statistics, the per capita disposable income of urban residents in China in 2018 was only 3,270 yuan per month, which means that in the vast majority of Chinese families, even if the monthly income of both husband and wife were added up, they would not be able to repay a loan of 6,688 yuan per month. This is a “quality” family that has a provident fund and can apply for a commercial loan.
Yan Dan questions who can believe that every urban resident in China currently has 39 square meters, and every rural resident even has 47.3 square meters to live in?
But at the same time, the article says that if we look at the “real estate leap forward” that the Chinese Communist Party has been making and the “ghost cities” and “vacancies” that are popping up everywhere, China should indeed have a home for everyone. The reason why this is not the case is that the dictatorial government has taken over the people’s land, resulting in 63.19% of the property price in taxes and fees, and using this to make huge profits for itself and let the people take the blame.
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