One week ago, we reported that China had found itself "On The Verge" of collapse as its "Welfare State Crumbles, Explosion In Social Unrest As Youth Unemployment Soars, Strikes Surge." All of this was the result of Beijing's very deliberate - and extremely risky - decision to not engage in a massive stimulus this time, unlike every previous occasion of sharp economist slowdown, and risk social unrest at best, or a full-blown revolution as an unthinkable worst case.

Here is the silver lining: all those revolutionaries will have brand new empty offices at their disposal when they finally take over. That's because as the FT reports, offices in China's biggest cities are emptier than they were during stringent Covid-19 lockdowns in what is the latest clear sign of how the country's economic slowdown has crushed business confidence.

At least a fifth of high-end office space was vacant in the tech hub of Shenzhen in June, according to data from three real estate agencies, while office vacancy rates in Beijing, Guangzhou and Shanghai were also higher than in June 2022. Naturally, with demand collapsing, rents are at least 10% lower than they were two years ago and in many cases much lower.

While a rise of flexible working has made it hard for developers to fill office space in cities such as London and San Francisco, and led to an unprecedented commercial real estate crisis, in Chinese cities - where far fewer people work from home - analysts said there is a much simpler cause for explosion in office vacancies: the collapsing economy.... which is amusing considering the centrally-planned central government has set a full-year economic growth target of about 5%. The reality is that China's economy is shrinking at that rate, if not much faster.