Most of the "Ghost Cities" that you read about ten years ago are now normal cities full of people. The Chinese innovation was building the cities before you moved people there, "opening" the city empty and then watching it slowly fill up with residential and commercial over a decade or two. This was always the plan. In the US, our current plan for cities is "Don't build them at all". In the US media we obsessively create headlines over Those Wacky Chinese And Their Weird Things, but we come up well short in this particular comparison.
For historical finance-culture reasons (they're reflexive savers, and there aren't many other investments allowed), China does have a lot of real estate investment relative to population, even considering their rapid urbanization, and not all of it is looking to be sustainable; In retrospect there's been a bit of a bubble. But >90% of it? There are hundreds of third/fourth-tier cities housing hundreds of millions of people that might have drawn fire originally under "Ghost City" theory.
In a worst-case scenario, what Chinese people get instead of a return on their nest egg investment is inexpensive houses/apartments with more living space, and maybe the option to support themselves without a DINK family.
For historical finance-culture reasons (they're reflexive savers, and there aren't many other investments allowed), China does have a lot of real estate investment relative to population, even considering their rapid urbanization, and not all of it is looking to be sustainable; In retrospect there's been a bit of a bubble. But >90% of it? There are hundreds of third/fourth-tier cities housing hundreds of millions of people that might have drawn fire originally under "Ghost City" theory.
In a worst-case scenario, what Chinese people get instead of a return on their nest egg investment is inexpensive houses/apartments with more living space, and maybe the option to support themselves without a DINK family.