How China’s unfinished housing projects are stopping Chinese men from finding wives
Some see urbanisation efforts in smaller cities as an example of Beijing swimming against the tide
The 15th-floor apartment in Yuncheng, overlooking the historic city’s famous salt lake, was intended to be the rural couple’s main betrothal gift to their youngest son’s fiancée.
They paid 80,000 yuan (HK$92,000), almost all their savings, as a down payment on an unfinished, two-bedroom apartment in the Shanxi city’s “top luxury mansion” project in February, hoping it would provide a decent home for a young couple.
It may take local government intervention to prevent such problems from becoming social issues
It’s a story repeated millions of times a year across China – the older generation using their savings to provide their children with urban residences so they can have better job prospects and be closer to amenities such as shopping malls that aren’t offered by quiet, rural villages.
Urbanisation, which has seen hundreds of millions of Chinese flock to cities and towns, has been a key factor underlying China’s economic boom and is still seen by Beijing as a growth driver the country can rely upon for years or even decades to come.
But the parents’ efforts to secure an urban future for their second son suffered an unexpected setback: the developer of Billionaire’s Lakeview Garden, a literal translation of the project’s Chinese name, ran out of cash and construction ground to a halt.
That shattered their 24-year-old son’s dream and led to the postponement of his wedding because in Yuncheng, as in many other places in China, a new apartment is generally viewed as an indispensable precondition for matrimony.