Abstract
Tower blocks in China and the US look the same in photos, but Brunt outlines how they are really very different. The quality of Chinese buildings is frequently shockingly low (glass of such low quality that you cannot see through the windows, doors with no glass at all, lifts that don’t work, bathrooms that flood and so on). This is not just a revelation about Chinese living standards. It is also a revelation about Chinese economic growth. Yes, China has made great progress and now has hundreds of thousands of tower blocks that it did not have 30 years ago; but failing to adjust for the low quality of those blocks would lead you to overestimate the true rate of progress of the Chinese economy.
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Brunt, L. (2017). Building Sights. In: China from the Inside. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65672-4_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65672-4_6
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Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-65671-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-65672-4
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