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The story
A video circulating on 5channel follows young people collapsing or sleeping rough on the streets of Wuhan, Shanghai, Shenyang, Kunshan, and other cities from 2024 to 2026, driven by hunger and destitution. The video argues that in cities once built on manufacturing, a wave of factory closures and layoffs has trapped young people in a vicious cycle — unable to return home, yet sinking deeper into poverty in the big cities. While some in the thread questioned the reliability of the source, others pointed to proxy indicators like salt consumption, container shipping volumes, and nighttime light levels to argue the situation is genuinely dire. Citing real-world examples like the delisting of China Evergrande Group amid the collapse of the property bubble, the discussion expanded into comparisons with Japan’s own “Lost Thirty Years” and debates over the shape of social safety nets.
Key points:
Destitute people turning up everywhere: From 2024 to 2026, footage from Wuhan, Shanghai, Shenyang, Kunshan, and other cities shows young people collapsing or sleeping on the street from hunger and poverty (0:24-6:17).
The toll of economic decline: In cities that were once manufacturing hubs, a wave of factory bankruptcies and layoffs has trapped young people who can’t return home in a vicious cycle of poverty in the big cities (3:23-4:10, 6:55-7:08).
Source: youtu.be / original video here
What people said
these are still supposedly the wealthy ones.
Most of that "wealthy class" is just officials who abused their positions to embezzle money.
You don't end up like that without being fundamentally shady.
Why would anyone take Falun Gong propaganda at face value? ("Kan Zhongguo," a Falun Gong-linked YouTube channel)
No, honestly, that claim is the real misinformation.
If a population of only 700 million built cities on the scale of Beijing, Shanghai, and 20 other metros, they'd have to be superhumanly efficient.
You need over a billion people functioning as virtual slaves to sustain the facade China puts up today.
The salt-consumption, container-shipping, and nighttime-light figures are legit indicators.
Watching America and China, you really see how a generous safety net like Japan's is nothing but a drag on national growth.
China's weak social security makes people anxious about the future, so they save way more than they need to — that's why the deflation spiral won't lift.
America doesn't have much social security, but it does have welfare.
Though apparently plenty of poor people just live off welfare and never work.
America… has welfare?
Then there's the fear of getting hit with damages if an old person dies after you help them, so shops kick people out and nobody lends a hand to someone collapsed on the street (a nod to China's well-known "good Samaritan lawsuit" fears).
That "money means you can do anything" vibe — must feel like paradise if you're rich, I guess.
You can get someone to dance for a tip worth just a few yen.
Heard someone made the same person dance for hours straight like that — laughed when I heard it, but that's seriously messed up.
Japan's urban planning isn't much to brag about either.
China, Japan, Korea — urban design is trash in all three.
Other Asian countries have better taste, honestly.
Kind of sad to think they're about to go through their own version of Japan's Lost Thirty Years.
Lately there's been news of young people who couldn't find jobs starving to death, or collapsing after going 20 days on nothing but water.
That kind of thing shows up in Southeast Asian countries where development stalled halfway.
Wait, they deregulated? Shops are disappearing though, aren't they?
Apparently each province runs its own separate system, so your health coverage changes when you move.
Right, and they also know that property becomes worthless after 70 years (China's land-use leases expire then), which is exactly why they were buying up Japanese real estate instead.
Turns out even that escape route is hard to pull off, though.
The government started retroactively taxing income going back 25 years, so people are having to liquidate the assets they got out just to cover the tax bill.
Blame the Bank of Japan governor.
And the Finance Ministry hiking taxes.
Xi Jinping probably thinks along similar lines to Japan's Finance Ministry —
he probably sees deflation forcing workers into low wages as ideal.
The deflation is at least partly deliberate policy.
"It hasn't collapsed, therefore it won't collapse" — that logic is, in a sense, valid in economics.
The real estate bubble already did collapse, so the premise is off in a bunch of ways.
But I think what people actually mean is that China won't see a financial crisis like the one that hit Japan afterward.
And yeah, I don't think that'll happen either.
They're probably counting on some kind of debt-cancellation edict.
But that just chills the economy over the medium-to-long term — it's only kicking the can down the road.
That's the part that actually matters.
China Evergrande Group, the real estate giant that ran into financial trouble carrying nearly 50 trillion yen in debt, was officially delisted from the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on the 25th.
Evergrande, one of China's biggest property developers, collapsed under roughly 50 trillion yen in debt and was delisted from the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in August 2025.
Evergrande's collapse stands as the single biggest turning point symbolizing the long unwind of China's property bubble.
It has collapsed, but China can absorb it domestically — the only real spillover to other countries is the flood of excess exports.
Background and Key Points of This Discussion
In China, the real estate market has been adjusting ever since Evergrande’s 2021 debt crisis broke, and the company was formally delisted from the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in August 2025. Local governments’ fiscal reliance on land-use-rights sales, plus regional disparities in the social security system tied to urban household registration (hukou), are cited as reasons unemployed young people struggle to move back to their hometowns. In the thread, skepticism about the video’s source (a personal YouTube channel) clashed with arguments — based on proxy economic indicators like salt consumption, container shipping volumes, and nighttime satellite light levels — that the situation is genuinely severe. There was also some talking past each other over the claim that “it can’t collapse because it’s a Communist Party system”: the real estate market has already entered an adjustment phase, even though it hasn’t triggered a Japan-style chain of financial-crisis failures.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5channel (Live Newsflash G) thread “China’s Economy: “The Shock of 24.1 Million Homeless, Young People Collapsing One After Another in the Streets” ← This Is Just What China’s Economy Actually Looks Like.”
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