the iPad and us (part 5, A Field Guide to Change in China)

Continuing on with our outsider's tour of the area around the Foxconn Factory, it's very obvious that the region is turning from this...



...to this.



Along the way, there's a whole lot of this:



This photo bears closer examination. Take a look at that apartment building in the middle. It's got about 30 floors, which, times 4 - 6 apartments per floor, times four people per apartment, times about ten buildings in the complex, yields a very conservative estimate of living space for at least 6000 people. Go down the road a bit, and there's another new apartment complex the same size or larger. Then another, and another. Just along the 15 minute route that I biked from my house to the Foxconn factory, I'd guess that I saw around ten of these complexes under construction, which translates to living space for about 60,000 people, about the same population of the "big city" of Moline, Illinois, near where I grew up.



So who's moving in to these instant cities? Right now, not very many people - lots of these buildings remain half vacant after they're built. Some apartments are bought by investors wanting to cash in on the skrocketing housing market (sound familiar, American readers?) and some remain unsold. So far, this housing bubble as kept these apartments out of reach to the people who work in, say, the Foxconn factory down the road. Down the road a few years? (or even six months?) Far be it from me to predict - I'm just a humble observer in these parts. The big challenge for China is whether the people who use the farm shed in picture #1 will eventually be able to afford the brand new apartments in picture #2.