China’s success in starting construction on 10m units of affordable housing this year has been stripped of some lustre by an admission that one third of the projects are little more than holes dug in the ground.
The housing ministry has qualified a previous statement that China had hit its 2011 public housing target starts by October, saying “construction starts” had been loosely defined. The move confirms earlier government concerns that building work was proceeding too slowly.
For the global economy, the distinction between digging holes and actually building homes in China has rarely been so important, as the affordable housing programme is an important swing factor in commodities markets.