Sometimes I suspect that this account is a classic case of a white guy pretending to be Chinese but when you bring up the “Chinese people owning houses doesn’t count because it’s in a rural area” it betrays a form of cretinism unique to Chinese liberals such as yourself, who like the boomer generation in America and the Soviet Union, seem hellbent on destroying your own society out of pure sheltered contrarianism.

Back of napkin math for average home price/minimum wage in Shanghai is: 13yrs vs. 25yrs in LA. I’m being generous here since home ownership is still technically possible in LA, as opposed to New York, where the majority of people rent their entire lives and never own property unless they move to the suburbs.

So in your scenario, your migrant worker starts off already owning a home in a rural area, has an easier time affording both rent and eventually buying a second home. In the American scenario you start off not owning a home, have to spend more of your income on rent, with the alternative being living on the streets (which will impact your ability to get a job again if you don’t end up dying). It’s unlikely that you’ll be able to afford buying a home in an urban area at all, and in the best case scenario you save enough to buy a house in the suburbs, which is the starting point of the migrant worker.

Given that I’m likely to be living out of my car at the end of this month, I want to personally tell you to go fuck yourself. I hope the CPC throws your ass in a gulag before you and your ilk destroy your country.

1. https://www.ceicdata.com/en/china/nbs-property-price-residential-monthly/property-price-ytd-avg-residential-shanghai
2. https://focus.cbbc.org/what-does-shanghais-minimum-wage-rise-imply-for-the-economy/
3. https://wagesla.lacity.gov/
4. https://www.redfin.com/city/11203/CA/Los-Angeles/housing-market

hey believe that welfare promotes laziness

Lower stage of socialism. Read state and revolution buddy.

As I said, a lot of similarities with how the Japanese handled their growth stagnation - sacrificing youth employment to preserve the existing employees and the corporations that have made bad investments. Hence the high youth unemployment in China right now. None of this is a coincidence once you understand how the economy works.

The Chinese liberal obsession with Japan, an economically, politically, and culturally irrelevant vassal state of the US, never ceases to agitate me. You want keynesian stimulus, the very same thing which created America’s financialized economy with no real productive capacity. Providing young people with do nothing jobs in the city doesn’t fix anything material, it just makes line go up.

For these people, the last resort is moving back to the villages and lay low.

I’m sure the homeless woman I watched die outside my apartment is grateful that she was given the freedom to freeze to death in an urban sidewalk as opposed to living in a rural area where the state guarantees land. Which mind you is the unattainable end goal for most people my age. And before you go on your liberal diatribe about how much rural china sucks I’ve been there and it’s still better than 90% of the planet.

In China, because of so much wealth has been tied to the real estate, letting the housing bubble burst would cause unmitigated chain reaction across the financial sectors and even spread to the real economy, so the government has to provide a “soft landing” by any means necessary.

Famously the 2008 Financial crisis never involved government bail-outs of any kind and never had any effects on the financial sector. This of course has never had any real world consequence¹ which definitely didn’t turn the city Detroit into a ghost town.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008–2010_automotive_industry_crisis#United_States

The key here is government providing “soft landing” by socializing the costs - using the national wealth to slow the plunging property prices. This way, when the house finally drops to $500k, you are not losing $500k, but that loss has been spread to 5 other buyers, as well as many others’ to prop up/slow the falling price. The cost is thus socialized. This translates to people working longer hours for lower wages, with their wealth being used to provide a soft landing, but at least you won’t see large scale “falling off the kill line”. In this sense, the working class took on the burden experienced by the home-owning middle class, and cushioning their losses.

This paragraph is completely nonsensical and betrays a lack of understanding of both liberal and marxist economics. Like a garbled zhihu post. A slow deflation is how bubbles are supposed to end. I don’t see how your alternative of allowing it to pop and create another 2008 financial crisis would benefit the working class. The same reduction in demand would exist in both cases, except in one case you have mild deflation and unemployment and on the other side case you have total economic collapse. Btw your whole “working class” “middle class” distinction is neoliberal nonsense, as is your “using their wealth to provide a soft landing” narrative.