Please click through and read for additional context. Families are helping. Parents age and are not a long-term plan except for the most unusually wealthy.

Please remember: China is nominally communist. Functionally, they are capitalists with an usual side of excess infrastructure spending. A strong central government doesn't make a country communist.

Their land use rules... that makes them communist-ish. But that's a small part of a far larger picture.

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[–] HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It sounds strange, but it is something that the Chinese national government has made policy to rein in. This includes a national ban on new skyscrapers and subway lines. If the national government has to ban different types of infrastructure to be built, it can be a sign of excessive spending.

[–] gary_host_laptop@lemmy.ml 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

As far as I know, the ban on skyscrapers is due to safety concerns and a sense of identity which make sense, vertical urban planning is good but the best middle point is buildings that are neither too small (because you are not taking advantage of the vertical space) nor too tall. This is not much different from US zoning laws, which work to appease to the car industry lobbyists.

Regarding subway lines, I can't find any information about that, just that they banned drinking in such places.

[–] HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 1 points 1 year ago

Here is an article in 2018 about China making it harder to build new mass transit:

https://www.caixinglobal.com/2018-07-14/china-makes-it-harder-to-get-ok-to-build-subways-light-rail-101302749.html

Here is an article in 2021 about China effectively no longer building subway lines in cities without an existing system, mainly due to trying to corral the real estate bubble:

https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1008813

The Chinese national and regional governments don't operate on the same economics or politics of Western governments, so the actions of one may not fully map to the actions of another.