, Columnist
China’s Building Crash Is Rewinding 22 Years of Growth
That may be bad for the economy, but it’s good for the planet — cement is one of the most polluting substances on earth.
China’s building crash is more than a blip.
Photographer: Wang Zhao/AFP/Getty Images
Casting your mind back to the China of 2003 almost feels like an exercise in historical fiction.
With an economy barely larger than Italy’s, it was still underdeveloped and isolated. Plagued by power shortages, a delinquent banking system, and SARS — the brief coronavirus epidemic that resembled a trial run for Covid-19 — there was still little outward sign of the coming boom.