China: Old And Busted: 1 Bed, 1 Bath. The New Hotness: 1 Bed In Bathroom
How bad does housing suck if you’re poor and live in Shanghai, China? This much:
“Shanghai’s landlords are quite ingenious, managing to convert even the smallest spaces into rentable rooms at high prices.”
Bathroom with a ladder to a crude loft above it? 600 yuan. (Exchange rate is currently running just above 7 yuan to the dollar.)
At least that had air-conditioning. For 300 yuan, you can get a room barely big enough for a small bed with two holes punched in the wall for ventilation.
For the same price, you can get a bathroom with a bed in the crawlspace right behind the toilet. “After using the toilet, the smell lingers in the room. Also don’t turn the shower head [over the tiny sink] on too high or it’ll soak the bed.”
One room is a twice-coffin size crawlspace off a balcony for 1,500 yuan.
But wait! For a mere 50 yuan, a guy rented a 0.3 square meter crawlspace he can’t fully lie down in. “Some local netizens from Shanghai commented that a closet could not be rented for 50 yuan, the price being at least 120 yuan.”
“This design is really thoughtful! Knowing you’d have to squat to cook noodles, they smartly place a toilet right here, complete with a door!”
“Here’s another place for 500 yuan rent combining living room, bedroom, kitchen and bathroom all in one!” Complete with cardboard box bed in the entry. “There’s a simple induction cooker for cooking, but it’s a tight squeeze for anyone a bit larger, though there is an exhaust fan. This stove is too far from the toilet. It’s inconvenient to cook while you are using a toilet, but when you shower you can easily stir fry at the same time.” No AC, but the landlord said they could add it for 200 extra yuan rent…
Of course, those exciting bed-in-toilet apartments are only available to people who can afford to pay any money for rent. Many can’t. “There are also groups known as Knights of the Bridge Underpass. In big cities, you can deliver food without renting a place. We found a bridge where several delivery guys and girls live.”
We’ve covered problems with youth despair in China before, including both the “lie flat” and “let it rot” movements.
“How do you deal with water and electricity?…First you can use water from public toilets, but this water is only for washing and laundry, not drinking.” To be fair, they show sinks in public toilets, so I imagine that’s where they’re getting their water, but it’s China, so who knows?
“Drinking water is bought from villagers nearby.”
“Electricity can be sourced from the batteries of delivery ebikes, which are rented for 300 to 400 a month. You can swap many each day, then connect an inverter to the battery you get 220 volt household electricity, and that solves that problem.” (220 volts was evidently standardized by the nationalist government in 1930.)
There’s a video blogger who lives in his solar equipped van, and he seems much better off than any other housing option covered in this video.
“It’s not just Shanghai. Nearly all major Chinese cities host these workers, often labeled as a low-end population. These include delivery workers, ride share drivers, factory or construction site laborers, or college students from out of town.” During America’s industrial boom, working in a factory allowed you to buy a house. Thanks to China’s factory boom, factory workers can enjoy living under a bridge.
“Working odd jobs, they hustle in every corner of the city, typically working over 10 hours a day without a single day off. The city’s prosperity doesn’t touch them. Their daily focus is simply on earning more money.”
The situation is slightly better in Beijing, which has 3 square meter apartments for 2000 yuan, and Shenzhen offers “urban villages” (I think we’d call them apartment complexes) with 1 bedroom apartments for 700 yuan a month.
In Guangdong, the so-called “Shango Gods” have completely given up on life and just live under bridges.
“The unemployed crowd together both men and women in an area filled with unbearable odors.”
“They work one day and rest for a week. A day’s pay can be 200 yuan, enough to sit in an Internet cafe for a week. They eat steamed buns, buy three or four to last the day.”
“In many cities, there are many of these so-called Shango Gods who have completely given up on life. ‘Already seeing no hope. This kind of life is actually pretty good. Wherever you go, just find a place to lie down and don’t think about anything, because no matter how hard you try, without connections it won’t work.'”
America is hardly free of homelessness or tiny apartments. But America’s homeless population is overwhelmingly mentally ill alcoholics and drug addicts living off handouts whose plight is catered to by a Homeless Industrial Complex that rakes off graft pretending to help them, not able-bodied young people willing to work but unable to afford even the meanest accommodations. And the smallest New York City apartments you can find on YouTube all look lightyears better than the horrors seen in Shanghai.
Communists have long bragged about working for the proletariat, but in Communist China, the actual proletarians have been reduced to living under bridges.
This entry was posted on Saturday, May 11th, 2024 at 2:06 PM and is filed under Communism, video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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8 Responses to “China: Old And Busted: 1 Bed, 1 Bath. The New Hotness: 1 Bed In Bathroom”
“One room is a twice-coffin size crawlspace off a balcony for 1,500 yuan.”
At the same price, compare this arrangement with the smallest apartment in Japan:
“The Tiny Inn Manekineko Gotokuji apartment in Tokyo rents for $210 (€189, £161) to $270 (€243, £207) per month, measures 9 feet (2.7 meters) wide by 13 feet (4 meters) deep, constituting an ultra-compact 108 square feet (10 square meters). The unit features creative design elements such as a step-up sleeping area that converts from an entrance platform during the day to a bed measuring 55 inches (140 centimeters) by 79 inches (200 centimeters). The kitchen fits a sink, cooktop burner, mini-fridge, and microwave oven along a narrow 3-foot (1 meter) strip of countertop. The unit also contains a compact wet bath area with a toilet, sink, and tiny shower stall.”
While claustrophobic, the Japanese unit offers all the amenities you could reasonably expect to find in a larger apartment while the Chinese living arrangement seems barely livable.
Misery is a daily occurrence under communism but at least a 2x coffin is better than the 1x coffin inhabited by the regime’s enemies.
The CCP is actually actively worse than the bad old Imperialist regimes. They’ve got less respect for the people they rule, and far less concern.
There’s an ego-driven lack of concern for the duties owed from the elites down to the lowest levels. They don’t even recognize them, let alone care.
This is the same basic deficiency that has Putin sending off thousands of men to die in Ukraine, and it’s the one that is going to kill these regimes in the end. China might have gotten away with it all when they were behind the old Bamboo Curtain, locked off like North Korea, but as they blew that up decades ago, everyone knows that living conditions are far better outside China. That set of facts doesn’t go anywhere good for the CCP, or China.
I believe that the lesson we’re going to see delivered to the elites of the world over the next century is going to be a demonstration of why you cannot overlook or blow off your responsibilities as a leader to your people. The coming demographic crash is going to be immense, and the tidal wave of second- and third-order effects will be huge.
Last time something like this happened? It was the Black Death, and that broke the grip of feudalism across Western Europe. Expect similar effects to come, many of which will be entirely unexpected.
China, like almost all of the rest of the world save sub-Saharan Africa, is experiencing a population crash. And while it should shrink to about 500 million by 2050, that’s not a lot of comfort for those described in this blog post today.
The current regime and its intrusive social credit scheme is making millions of lives in China miserable. Together with the fact that they murdered millions of baby girls in their “one-child” policy era, are the causes of the current population crash. Who would want to bring a child into the world under such conditions?
And let’s not deny that the same conditions don’t exist for the rest of the world either. The WEF and Our Betters have decided to reduce the world’s population to no more than 500 million through war, pestilence, starvation, abortion, feminism and trannyism they’ve been doing a pretty good job so far.
The > 200V indoor standards were picked in many countries simply because that allowed thinner (cheaper) wires indoors. That’s for the in-wall wiring and the appliance wiring. The US and a few others chose the ~100V range for safety, even at the cost of heavier wires.
Heh. When I was 39-40 and divorced, I worked 9-10 hours a day every day delivering pizzas. (The store was closed Christmas day.)
That was in 1988. I averaged about $80/day as a ‘contract employee”. I lived in an old house with e tiehr guys, and I had a bedroom about 9×10, and shared a kitchen, bath, and small living room. I think my share of the rent was around $90/mo.
Did that for nearly 3 years. It was actually quite pleasant and healthy. To make good tips delivering pizzas back hen you needed a ‘reliable’ car (I bought them for $50-200 and drove them until they totally broke), an encyclopedic knowledge of the streets, alleys, and buildings in a city of 200,000, and a willingness to run. 40 deliveries a day would net you the $80 average.
But it was volunteer for me. I could have done other things. The young Chinese are just screwed.
I assume that the young men will eventually (soon?) be drafted into the Peoples’ Army for the coming festivities in Taiwan.
[…] in Cuba, calls for more aggressive repression Baldilocks: The Battle Continues BattleSwarm: China: Old And Busted: 1 Bed, 1 Bath. The New Hotness: 1 Bed In Bathroom, Police Flee High Crime California For Texas, Shoigu Out As Russia’s Defense Minister, Cuellar […]
“One room is a twice-coffin size crawlspace off a balcony for 1,500 yuan.”
At the same price, compare this arrangement with the smallest apartment in Japan:
“The Tiny Inn Manekineko Gotokuji apartment in Tokyo rents for $210 (€189, £161) to $270 (€243, £207) per month, measures 9 feet (2.7 meters) wide by 13 feet (4 meters) deep, constituting an ultra-compact 108 square feet (10 square meters). The unit features creative design elements such as a step-up sleeping area that converts from an entrance platform during the day to a bed measuring 55 inches (140 centimeters) by 79 inches (200 centimeters). The kitchen fits a sink, cooktop burner, mini-fridge, and microwave oven along a narrow 3-foot (1 meter) strip of countertop. The unit also contains a compact wet bath area with a toilet, sink, and tiny shower stall.”
While claustrophobic, the Japanese unit offers all the amenities you could reasonably expect to find in a larger apartment while the Chinese living arrangement seems barely livable.
Misery is a daily occurrence under communism but at least a 2x coffin is better than the 1x coffin inhabited by the regime’s enemies.
The CCP is actually actively worse than the bad old Imperialist regimes. They’ve got less respect for the people they rule, and far less concern.
There’s an ego-driven lack of concern for the duties owed from the elites down to the lowest levels. They don’t even recognize them, let alone care.
This is the same basic deficiency that has Putin sending off thousands of men to die in Ukraine, and it’s the one that is going to kill these regimes in the end. China might have gotten away with it all when they were behind the old Bamboo Curtain, locked off like North Korea, but as they blew that up decades ago, everyone knows that living conditions are far better outside China. That set of facts doesn’t go anywhere good for the CCP, or China.
I believe that the lesson we’re going to see delivered to the elites of the world over the next century is going to be a demonstration of why you cannot overlook or blow off your responsibilities as a leader to your people. The coming demographic crash is going to be immense, and the tidal wave of second- and third-order effects will be huge.
Last time something like this happened? It was the Black Death, and that broke the grip of feudalism across Western Europe. Expect similar effects to come, many of which will be entirely unexpected.
China, like almost all of the rest of the world save sub-Saharan Africa, is experiencing a population crash. And while it should shrink to about 500 million by 2050, that’s not a lot of comfort for those described in this blog post today.
The current regime and its intrusive social credit scheme is making millions of lives in China miserable. Together with the fact that they murdered millions of baby girls in their “one-child” policy era, are the causes of the current population crash. Who would want to bring a child into the world under such conditions?
And let’s not deny that the same conditions don’t exist for the rest of the world either. The WEF and Our Betters have decided to reduce the world’s population to no more than 500 million through war, pestilence, starvation, abortion, feminism and trannyism they’ve been doing a pretty good job so far.
[…] MEANWHILE IN SHANGHAI: China: Old And Busted: 1 Bed, 1 Bath. The New Hotness: 1 Bed In Bathroom. […]
Ooops. The headline writer seems a bit math-challenged.
3 ft by 3 ft is a whole NINE square feet !!!”# sq ft.
“3 sq ft” is a square 1 ft 9 ” on a side.
The > 200V indoor standards were picked in many countries simply because that allowed thinner (cheaper) wires indoors. That’s for the in-wall wiring and the appliance wiring. The US and a few others chose the ~100V range for safety, even at the cost of heavier wires.
Heh. When I was 39-40 and divorced, I worked 9-10 hours a day every day delivering pizzas. (The store was closed Christmas day.)
That was in 1988. I averaged about $80/day as a ‘contract employee”. I lived in an old house with e tiehr guys, and I had a bedroom about 9×10, and shared a kitchen, bath, and small living room. I think my share of the rent was around $90/mo.
Did that for nearly 3 years. It was actually quite pleasant and healthy. To make good tips delivering pizzas back hen you needed a ‘reliable’ car (I bought them for $50-200 and drove them until they totally broke), an encyclopedic knowledge of the streets, alleys, and buildings in a city of 200,000, and a willingness to run. 40 deliveries a day would net you the $80 average.
But it was volunteer for me. I could have done other things. The young Chinese are just screwed.
I assume that the young men will eventually (soon?) be drafted into the Peoples’ Army for the coming festivities in Taiwan.
[…] in Cuba, calls for more aggressive repression Baldilocks: The Battle Continues BattleSwarm: China: Old And Busted: 1 Bed, 1 Bath. The New Hotness: 1 Bed In Bathroom, Police Flee High Crime California For Texas, Shoigu Out As Russia’s Defense Minister, Cuellar […]