You can't really talk about China being a planned economy at this point. I mean, planning goes on but it's like economic planning in Japan - something the gove

You can't really talk about China being a planned economy at this point. I mean, planning goes on but it's like economic planning in Japan - something the government does through incentives and persuasion rather than commands and production quotas. You can read the Wikipedia page on these for the actual reasons they happen[1]. It's all about Chinese local governments selling property to speculators to raise revenue and the speculators having to build to hold them rather than just sitting on the lots like regular capitalist speculators can. This does represent an inefficient use of resources but not a huge one, past ghost towns have all been filled eventually. Rapid growth covers a multitude of sins. Goodness knows what'll happen when the growth slows, as it must, but there's no particular reason to think that'll happen soon. This is yet another way that China looks like early 19th century US. Not only are they copying industrial designs a la Samuel Slater and industrializing rapidly, they're financing local government via land speculation the way we did in the US back then. Hopefully when they have their equivalent of the panic of 1839 they'll make similar reforms. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_under-occupied_developments_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_under-occupied_develop...