China has turned half a trillion dollars of central bank money into bricks and mortar, and there’s more to come.
That transformation can be best seen in Heze, a ‘small’ city of about nine million in the province of Shandong. There, local authorities have ripped down more than a quarter of a million older houses since 2015, some of them traditional-style homes with calligraphy emblazoned above wooden doors, in order to build new ones financed largely by money printed by the People’s Bank of China.
