Workers for a major Chinese developer are going without pay, and job sites are going unfinished as the Chinese real estate market struggles, according to Reuters.
Country Garden, formerly China’s largest real estate developer by sales volume, is in the midst of a debt crisis indicative of the Chinese real estate industry as a whole, according to Reuters. Workers at the Country Garden Yunhe Shangyuan project site on the outskirts of the 14 million-person city of Tianjin are saying that they have not been paid for months and that construction has stopped, leaving sites unfinished. (RELATED: Company Building EV Battery Factory Near US Military Installations Listed As Chinese Principal, Filings Show)
“They haven’t paid us since Chinese New Year (January). We are all worried,” a worker who stopped working at the Yunhe Shanyuan site last week told Reuters. Workers living in dorms on site said they have gone months without pay.
Country Garden has $191.7 billion in liabilities with 3,121 projects across all of China, according to Reuters. Since the debt crisis began in 2021, companies responsible for 40% of Chinese home sales have defaulted on their debt.
China is facing a “Lehman Moment” that could spark a financial crisis, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The Chinese economy is flatlining, youth unemployment is skyrocketing, and $5 trillion in homebuilder debt is at-risk.
Now the government is ordering banks to prop up… pic.twitter.com/C2R7FR8ZOP
— Peter St Onge, Ph.D. (@profstonge) August 21, 2023
“I’m under a lot of pressure,” another worker at the Yunhe Shangyuan site told Reuters. “I have a wife and kid who’s about to return to school, as well as elderly parents… Workers can’t live on this.”
Another major Chinese real estate developer, Evergrande Groupe, announced Friday it would be restructuring its $340 billion in debt in U.S. bankruptcy court in order to avoid defaulting on foreign bondholders. Chinese security regulators also announced Friday measures to boost the country’s stumbling stock market as exports, investment, factory output and retail sales all slow.
Country Garden did not immediately respond to a request to comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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