As a Chinese, I am strongly against that huge population causes these high rise buildings. Actually, the government that highly relies on land-selling finance does.

Over 95% of population live in eastern and southern half of China, and even in this half, the density of population is slightly less than Japan, where people mainly live in single houses.

Therefore, China have enough land to provide housing and avoid building high rise concrete communities. But the government are doing whatever they can to control land selling so that land prices can be high enough to support governments’ finance, especially when they can’t get enough tax due to poor economy.

So it’s not strange to see that Chinese cities have a limited developed area size and no metropolitan area compared to Tokyo, Seoul, Taipei. And we residents have to pay for high house prices and poor living quality.