Billions of Chinese can't fill the country's empty homes, says former official.

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A former Chinese government official said the country's population of 1.4 billion is not enough to fill all the empty apartments, Reuters reported, citing a video by China's state-run China News Service.

The problems of Chinese real estate became apparent in 2021 when industry giant Evergrande became the world's most indebted company and failed to meet its obligations. By then, there were at least 65 million empty properties in the country, which would have been enough to house the entire population of France, Insider previously reported.

"How many empty homes are there now? Every expert gives very different figures, and the most extreme believe that the current number of empty homes is enough to house 3 billion people," said He Keng, former deputy head of the statistics bureau, according to Reuters. "That estimate is probably a bit high, but 1.4 billion people probably won't be able to fill them.

China has long relied on real estate development as a safe investment to support economic growth. But it led to oversupply, and numerous high-rises were left empty.

"They created a surplus and then sold it off. That's why you see these vacant properties," Li Gang, an economics professor at the University of Texas M Am, told Insider in 2021.

Many construction sites also became so-called "rotten projects" when they stopped or were abandoned halfway through.

Cities such as Shenyang, in the northeast of the country, were designed as new hotspots for Chinese millionaires with luxury European-style villas. But the development project, led by the industry's largest company, Greenland Group, which began in 2010, was abandoned after just two years.

Today, these abandoned towns have been transformed into villages of farmers, where they farm the land and livestock walk freely around empty mansions.

Ordos, near the Mongolian border, was supposed to house more than 1 million people and become a cultural and economic center. But by 2016, its population was only about 100,000 and it has been described as "the largest ghost town in the world. "

The government has since made efforts to relocate some of the country's top schools to the region, leading to an influx of families and talented students, boosting population and real estate prices, the Japanese publication Nikkei Asia reported in 2021.

Despite these efforts, Inner Mongolia, the autonomous region of China where Ordos is located, remains one of the country's slowest-growing areas, according to the report.

"We can't shake the fear that if new development picks up, we will create a new ghost town," said real estatedeveloper Ordos, according to Nikkei Asia.