China built Australia last year — 1.9 billion square metres of residential floor space. Actually, that's not quite true — the total floor space of all of Australia's housing isn't quite that big.
In the previous 15 years, China pretty much built Europe as 300 million people or so moved from the farms and villages into cities.

And the really neat thing is that they're going to do it again in the next 20 years, plus the quality of the buildings and the floor space per person are likely to improve, which means they're going to be buying a lot more iron ore and coking coal. Yes, Twiggy, Gina and Marius, there is a Santa Claus and he speaks Mandarin.
At this stage the China bears inevitably start growling about bubbles and over-building and ghost cities and empty luxury unit towers and, as usual, they're a little bit right but mostly wrong.

Overlooked in a very busy week is some rational reading from the Reserve Bank's research department on China's housing construction that makes much more sense than the Doomsday brigade's rants and raves. It's also why this week's determined efforts by the commentariat herd to find gloom and doom in basically reasonable figures is so pathetically short-sighted.
According to the research discussion paper by the RBA's Leon Berkelmans and Hao Wang, China's extraordinary surge in housing construction will indeed peak and then fall back — but the peak isn't expected until 2017 and it should then stabilise at elevated levels, not falling back to the current amazing level until some time around 2030.
The authors very reasonably point out that such a forecast is based on a number of assumptions and that there are downside risks, but there are risks on the upside as well. It's the sort of thinking that has the RBA suspecting our terms of trade will remain historically high, even as last year's bubble prices have been blown off the top of the boom.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/business/the-boom-that-keeps-on-giving-20120907-25ivp.html#ixzz25lOpzjcK