China’s Great Depression Is Here: Empty Streets, Empty Malls, Empty Factories, Shanghai Collapses

All over the country, more and more Chinese vloggers are posting videos saying the same thing. Places that used to be lively, now have shops shutting down left and right. This year's been so hard to make any money. The market's just getting tighter and tighter. Take my shop, it's been here 10 years. I've still got regulars, otherwise, I would've closed for good a long time ago. Look, it's 8 in the morning, peak time for buying groceries. Where is everybody? Factories are shutting down in droves as well. Supply is way bigger than demand. Manufacturing plants are shutting down in stretches. But they're still putting up new factories. You build all these plants and there's no customers. What's the point? They won't rent. Factories aren't empty because the rent's too high. There's just no manufacturing left. And they're still putting up all these factories. Rent them to who? Rent it to me, some broker, as a dorm? I can't live in something that huge. It's not about whether there's money to be made anymore. It's that there are no orders. Nobody's even in the market. So what if you drop your price? Does it even matter? July and August this year, the line I heard more than anything else was, no orders, no customers. Some factories have already sent a third of their workers home. The ones still working still get Saturdays and Sundays off. In a situation like this, you still think the only way to survive is volume? Where's your volume? In Guangdong, one of China's major economic provinces, Foshan used to be considered quite developed. These days, things are looking pretty bad. The situation in Foshan right now, if I told people, a lot of them wouldn't believe it. 90% of people can't sleep at night. Supermarket owners can't sleep. Restaurant people can't sleep. Furniture sellers can't sleep. Renovation and building materials people can't sleep. Beauty salon people can't sleep either. This is Foshan Longjiang. A lot of the showrooms on both sides are up for rent. Barely any cars on the road. It used to be packed with trucks here. It's really bleak. Tiles keep getting cheaper, but the tile bosses' pockets keep getting emptier. Today is my fourth day in Foshan. Right across from where I'm staying is the headquarters base. Pretty much the biggest cluster of high-end tile brands in Foshan right now. Over the last few days, I've talked to a lot of tile showroom owners and we walked around ourselves. Foshan right now, I can only describe it with one word, bleak. Once real estate tanks, renovation and building materials are the first to get hit, Foshan ceramics is the most typical snapshot of that. To put it bluntly, those bosses who used to live off the boom, drink every day, hit the nightclubs, they really can't keep it up anymore. Wallets are empty and they don't even want to come out. A good model gets developed and it's immediately copied. They use less and less materials, so prices keep dropping. The whole industry has fallen into a death loop. There's really no way out. The vlogger also said Foshan is a lot more depressed now than it was five years ago. The streets are empty. There aren't many people in the restaurants either. What's hardest to understand is that this is a city where you can't get a meal after 2 p.m. The restaurants actually close after 2. For his first meal in Foshan, it was already 3 p.m. He called 4 or 5 places and they were all closed. In the end, he ordered takeout. In the first quarter of this year, Foshan's economy contracted by 2.4%. Its GDP ranking in Guangdong also dropped to 4th. In 2025, Foshan's GDP grew just 0.2%. That put it last in Guangdong and at the bottom among China's trillion yuan cities. China's real estate industry has a long supply chain. It's tied to more than 50 sectors. Steel, cement, home appliances, building materials, logistics and more. Years of decline in the housing market have left demand for home furnishings badly depressed. And Foshan is a major hub for China's kitchen and bathroom industry. According to the Foshan Sanitary Ware Industry Association, the Foshan production area once had more than 2,000 bathroom fixture manufacturers clustered there. As the real estate industry shifted, a lot of small and medium-sized companies without real competitive strength have quietly stopped production or switched to something else. Official figures from the government show the real estate picture from January to July this year looks even worse. From January through July, nationwide real estate development investment came in at 4.3 trillion yuan, about $640 billion, down 19.2% from a year earlier. That drop widened by 1.2 percentage points compared with January through June. Newly started housing floor space was 2.9 billion square feet, down 24%. Completed housing floor space was 2 billion square feet, down 23.2%. Sales of newly built commercial housing came to 4.8 billion square feet, down 11.8%. As mainland China's economy keeps sliding, county economies in places that used to be relatively developed Zhejiang, Jiangsu, Shanghai and elsewhere have started tightening too. Locals say that over the past two years, wages in these counties have kept falling. For a lot of young people, after they pay social security, their monthly pay is only enough to eat. Some are even having trouble making the mortgage. Suddenly, I just want to laugh, that kind of helpless laugh. I can imagine construction sites in small counties, but I never imagined it could get this bad. 10 yuan an hour work. I interviewed for one day, 2,000 yuan, 2,200 yuan too. Then they take 400 out of the 2,200 yuan for social insurance, leaving you with a little over 1,000. How do you live on a little over 1,000 yuan? I knew you would be low, but this low is just ridiculous. Tell me, how are you supposed to live on just a little over 1,000 yuan a month? On top of that, because jobs are so hard to find, a lot of young people in Shanghai and Hanzhou are moving back to small towns and competing for the same openings. That's directly driving down the pay. Shanghai is the most developed city in mainland China. Its GDP makes up about 4% of the national total and for years it sat at the top among mainland cities. But since the three years of COVID measures, Shanghai's economy hasn't been doing well either. A government report at the end of July showed that in the first half of the year, not a single one of China's 31 provincial-level regions reached 100% fiscal self-sufficiency. Added together, the local fiscal self-sufficiency rate was only 56.3%. Their revenue also can't fully cover their huge spending habits. Even Shanghai, long the strongest fiscally, is running in the red. Over the past three years, foreign companies have been pulling out of Shanghai in large numbers or shrinking their operations there. This year, high-end foreign beauty brands like Francense, Filorga, and South Korea's Hintz shut down their Shanghai operations and pulled out of domestic e-commerce. Industrial coatings company Sherwin-Williams liquidated its Shanghai Asia-Pacific headquarters After taking back all the equity in the joint venture Nokia-Shanghai Bell, Nokia hasn't just closed Hangzhou. Traditional business R&D at its bases in Shanghai, Beijing, Chengdu, and Qingdao is also being gradually cut, merged, or phased out. Nokia's average headcount in the Greater China Region has dropped from about 13,700 in 2020 to around 7,200 now. Lately, quite a few vloggers have been filming how depressed Shanghai looks. All closed, not one shop still open. Over here, they wrote two little words, rent-free, no charge. Would you want to come here and open a business? Let's take a look today at Qupu Road, which used to be packed with traffic. What's it like now? Let's see what Shanghai's brick-and-mortar economy looks like. Across the street used to be Shanghai's hottest market, shoulder-to-shoulder. Whether you came to stock up or just buy clothes, Saturday, Sunday, if you walked a little slow, your shoes would actually get stepped right off. This is the first floor. They used to sell shoes and bags here. Now you stand at the door and you can smell a strong musty smell. It's been vacant for a long time. Let's go inside and see if there are any vendors left. What's it like in there? Come in through here. Look, these are all men's slippers. Next to them, loungewear. And over here, there's a special. 100 yuan for three pieces. Women's clothes, 59 yuan. Retail prices are cheap too. It used to be when we came to this market, especially on weekends, you just stand there and the crowd would push you right along. Have you noticed lately it feels like there are fewer and fewer people in Shanghai? We run a hotel and a small restaurant too. Our hotel and this little restaurant, compared with last year, the drop in customers is pretty obvious. Just now a guy came into my place. We talked a bit. He works in the building here and comes to our restaurant to eat. He said the whole building feels a lot emptier. The buildings around here emptied out too. And the people dropped off all of a sudden. It's really obvious. He's been here for six years. Feels like fewer people every year. So going forward, who knows? Every industry is having a hard time now. Anyone who can still hang on is already doing pretty damn well. This government insider said Shanghainese are all cursing Xi Jinping now for driving Shanghai's economy into the ground. Complaints are everywhere online. You can't make money delivering food. Too many people doing it. I made 12 yuan in two hours. What am I supposed to do? Forget it. I'm done talking about it. A lot of bosses have fallen back into poverty now. Nobody saw this coming. How did it get to this point? Actually, it's not that hard to understand. I deal with people in debt every day. I know it's not just one industry that's dead. Every industry is dead. Whether they run bathhouses, do construction projects, or operate so-called tech companies, they still blame it on the industry being bad, the overall environment being bad, and that's why they went under. I'm in my 30s. I pull my hair back, and there's a lot of grey. I used to make over 10 million yuan a year, lived in a villa, drove a million-yuan Porsche. Now, after I sold off 25 million yuan in assets, I'm still 3.2 million in debt. Now I've fallen to delivering food during the day and running a street store at night, splitting every bit of money in half. In five years, I went from owning six shops to having nothing. In July, the urban unemployment rate for people ages 16 to 24, not counting students, hit 17.9%. That's a new high in 11 months. But people outside China generally believe that official figures are cooked, and the real unemployment rate could be twice that. Hello, everyone. You can't stop studying even after you lose your job. Hey, everyone. After we lost our jobs, we couldn't sit still for a second. The two of us immediately found a factory and went in for an interview. We ended up leaving after trying it for an hour. No air conditioning in the plant. You have to squat on the ground the whole time looking for stuff. Just way too hot. Next, we're heading home. Then we'll look around for other work. This year's getting harder and harder for working people. A lot of them are carrying their bags, finish Jiangsu, then hit Zhejiang, then finish Zhejiang, and then hit Guangdong, looking for work every day and hitting a wall every day. Either the pay's too low, or they don't want men, or they don't want anyone older, don't want anyone without a degree. A lot of people never imagined before they left home that finding a job could get this hard. That part, the part that really hits you, a lot of them can't hold on anymore. They actually want to go home. But the family thinks you're out there working and making money. How do you even tell them you don't have a job? So a lot of them just keep toughing it out, looking for work all day, then lying in a rented room or a park at night, staring at nothing. Only people who've actually been through it know, the scariest thing now isn't being tired. It's seeing no hope. I heard a lot of people who lost their jobs this year just chose to lie flat. I'll quietly ask one thing. If you're lying flat, where does the daily spend come from? Where does the daily living expenses come from? I've been lying flat at home this year, and I already feel like I can't make ends meet. I want to make money. I dream about making money. First thing I think when I open my eyes every day is making money. The problem is, I don't even know how to make money or where I can make it. A lot of people can't find work. Plenty of others are getting by on odd jobs, and they're sleeping on the streets to save money. Early morning in the station passageway, no soft bed. The cold floor tiles are their bed tonight. They're not homeless. They just can't bring themselves to spend a few dozen yuan on a hotel. Save that lodging money for the rice and oil at home, for the kids' living expenses, for the old folks' medicine. Just waiting for the cheapest green train at dawn, heading to the next job site, the next odd job, scraping together a wage to get by. A lot of people are making a living picking through trash. One blogger filmed the dumpster that got rummaged through several times a day. I said this a long time ago. China's trash doesn't need to be sorted. They even put out a few bins, recyclable, non-recyclable. What's the point? Just throw it all in. Somebody's already sorted it precisely for you. They go through it eight times a day. You still need to sort it at home? On the street, you also often see people who pick through trash fighting and grabbing things from each other. China's GDP grew 4.3% year-on-year in the second quarter. That's slower than the first quarter's 5%, and the weakest quarterly pace in more than three years. First half GDP was up 4.7% from a year earlier. But speculation that the official numbers are inflated never really stops. The latest official July data also showed the broader economy staying weak. Industrial added value rose 4.5% year-on-year, a clear step down from June's 5.3%. Total retail sales of consumer goods grew just 0.6%, well below market forecasts. With the economy this week, the Chinese Communist Party's Central Financial and Economic Affairs Commission put out articles for four days straight in late August, trying to restore market confidence. It said you can't look at China's economy only by speed, and you shouldn't be bothered by a single quarter or month's numbers being high or low. Hong Kong's Ming Pao wrote that a few articles aren't going to move the market, restore confidence, or sing the bright story of China's economy. What the market cares about is what actual measures there are to fix incomes and expectations. The lives of ordinary people are still hard, real unemployment is rising, and incomes are still falling. A veteran political and economic analyst based in the U.S., Qin Peng, said on his show that the Central Financial and Economic Affairs Commission is headed by Xi Jinping himself. These articles were Xi talking directly to the people, bypassing every ministry. Qin said the commission itself admitted three things. One, that the economy is shrinking. Two, that investment isn't coming back. And three, that there won't be a big flood of stimulus. Qin said the party has fallen into a complex trap. The first problem is that the economy needs saving, but there's no money. The second is whether to pursue high-quality growth or protect the security of the regime. In essence, this series of articles is zoning high strategic mobilization to pull back the defensive line while the economy is hemorrhaging. It signals a party is giving up on broad-based prosperity and shifting towards a quasi-wartime economic system. Limited funds won't flow into ordinary people's pockets. Instead, they'll keep being pumped into the front lines of a high-tech Cold War, into energy security strongholds, and into the party's own stability maintenance machine.