Built on Concrete: China, Evergrande, and the Fortune the World Mistook for Wealth
M. Muñoz
M. Muñoz
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133
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About this ebook
On an August morning in 2021, fifteen finished apartment towers beside a lake in Kunming, China, were dynamited in forty-five seconds. No one had ever lived in them. For over two decades, China funneled the savings of hundreds of millions of families into concrete, turning housing into a national piggy bank, a retirement plan, and an unwritten condition for marriage, until roughly a quarter of the economy rested on the belief that apartment prices could only rise. This book tells that story: how a 1998 reform first let ordinary citizens own property, how Evergrande's founder Xu Jiayin built an empire on debt and apartments that existed only on paper, and how Beijing's 2020 “Three Red Lines” policy triggered the largest real estate reckoning in history—not a single crash, but a slow-motion collapse still unfolding. It follows families who moved into unfinished “rotten-tail” buildings rather than pay for two homes, mining towns worldwide that felt the shockwaves, and the uncomfortable echoes of Spain's 2008 crisis and Japan's lost decades. Written with strict political neutrality, this is the definitive account of what happens when a nation discovers its wealth was never as solid as the concrete it poured into.
On an August morning in 2021, fifteen finished apartment towers beside a lake in Kunming, China, were dynamited in forty-five seconds. No one had ever lived in them. For over two decades, China funneled the savings of hundreds of millions of families into concrete, turning housing into a national...
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