Reading this article, I am struck by how it frames China’s urbanization, inequality, and social changes as proof that we are following a capitalist path and suffering its inevitable “pathologies.” While it is true that China has urbanized rapidly and that housing pressures exist, the analysis misrepresents the reality and ignores the context. Our urbanization has involved hundreds of millions moving to cities, but this is the result of decades of state planning and industrial policy, not some inevitable capitalist logic. Similarly, the rise in single-person households reflects demographic shifts such as delayed marriage, an aging population, and rural-to-urban migration, rather than an inherent capitalist malaise.

The article also exaggerates inequality and housing pressures. Yes, there are regional and income disparities, especially between coastal cities and interior provinces, but asset concentration is not as extreme as the article claims. Statements that buying a typical apartment would take decades of income are based on a few high-cost cities, not the country as a whole. Unemployment data is also misrepresented. Urban unemployment remains stable at around 5 percent, and while youth unemployment is higher, official statistics have not been suppressed they show it peaking around 21 percent in 2023 which led to polocy reevaluation leading it to drop to around 16 percent in late 2025. These distortions ignore the state’s ongoing role in guiding development, stabilizing employment, and ensuring social stability.

The property sector slowdown is treated as a “crisis” in the article, but this framing is misleading at best. The slowdown is largely intentional: the government has been deflating speculative bubbles, controlling debt, and rebalancing the real estate market to make it more sustainable, rather than allowing an uncontrolled collapse. Presenting it as proof that China has succumbed to capitalist excess ignores the deliberate, long-term strategy of state-managed development.

I am also frustrated by the implicit framing that if China does not match a Western, idealist image of a communist utopia, then we must have “become capitalist.” We are building socialism with Chinese characteristics, and our contradictions (inequality, housing pressures, youth labor challenges) are historically specific outcomes of our modernization, semi-colonial legacy, and integration into the global economy. They are not inevitable capitalist pathologies. To insist that we must fail by liberal definitions of capitalism or match a Western utopian ideal is a misreading rooted in ideology, not in material reality.

From my perspective, China’s challenges reflect uneven development, demographic transition, and deliberate policy choices, not a surrender to capitalism. State planning, industrial guidance, and social policy continue to shape outcomes, stabilize employment, and prevent speculative crises. Urbanization, inequality, and housing pressures are therefore part of the historical process of building socialism in a large, rapidly changing society, not evidence that we have “gone capitalist.” Oversimplifying these trends as inevitable capitalist pathologies ignores both history and material reality, and reduces China to a caricature designed to fit Western ideological expectations.