A report from the South China Morning Post. "Half-built roads, high-rises under construction and plastic garbage shining under the sun: those were the images that frequently flashed by on a two-hour drive between the Shenzhen Bay-Hong Kong border and the third-tier city of Huizhou. Huizhou is now at the centre of a storm that is hanging over the mainland's slowing economy. And a developer, Guang Group, is having cash-flow problems. 'We are just here for a look,' said a middle-aged woman accompanying a young couple as they got out of a car. Five minutes later, they were gone, refusing to leave her their number when asked for it. They were the only group to set foot in the showroom in about half an hour."

"Another developer is selling its project at a discount at 6,000 yuan (HK$7,490) per square metre and helping homebuyers dodge down payment restrictions. Many other small cities and towns across the mainland are finding themselves confronted with the same challenge: a cooling property and land market is drying up local government coffers. 'Like many third and fourth-tier cities, Huizhou's population and industrial growth are two or three years behind its property development, causing an oversupply of homes at the current stage,' said Zhou Xiaren, a deputy head of property services firm Worldunion's Huizhou branch."

From Xinhua. "The Chinese cities of Ordos, Yulin and Shuozhou have been hurt economically over recent years due to plunging coal prices. According to government data, Ordos' YoY GDP growth dropped by 7.5% during the Q1 of 2014, while Shuozhou's slipped by 5.4% and that of Yulin fell by 1.4%. Excessive investment in real estate has also resulted in a serious imbalance in supply and demand, and since coal prices began falling, real estate in these cities has become unmarketable. The mayor of Ordos stated in March that there were 40,000 units of housing available for sale and that the city will not build any new housing over the next three years."

"According to the data, a mere 600 square meters of housing was sold during the first two months of this year, plunging 97.5% from a year ago."

Want China Times. "Amid the sluggish realty market, land sales in major Chinese cities have plunged, leading to sharp declines in their realty-related income. Sharp declines in land transactions have caused major financial problems for some cities with a heavy reliance on realty sales, such as Hangzhou, Foshan, Nanjing, and Changsha, with the financial reliance on realty transactions all surpassing 100%."

"The realty-related income of Ordos, in Inner Mongolia, for instance, has topped only some 1 billion yuan (US$160 million) so far this year, a far cry from some 10 billion yuan (US$1.6 billion) annually in previous years. 'Stagnant land sales are a major financial problem for Ordos, which has to repay some 30 billion yuan (US$4.8 billion) in debt this year,' remarked a financial official from the city."

From Shanghai Daily. "New home sales in Shanghai remained below the 150,000-square-meter threshold for the fourth straight week despite a week-on-week increase. The purchases of new homes, excluding government-funded affordable housing, rose 26.4 percent week on week to 140,700 square meters during the seven-day period ended on Sunday, Shanghai Uwin Real Estate Information Services Co said in a report. The gains were mainly due to sales at a mid- to low-end project in outlying Jiading District, said Huang Zhijian, chief analyst at Uwin. 'The overall volume for June may remain very low if real estate developers continue to maintain their prices without offering any big discounts,' Huang said."

"More than 210 units at the Jiading development were sold last week for an average price of 16,715 yuan (US$2,692) per square meter, Uwin data showed. This brought the average cost of a new home down 12.5 percent week on week to 25,916 yuan per square meter citywide. Lu Qilin, a researcher at Shanghai Deovolente Realty Co, said: 'The average price recorded last week was down 18.7 percent from the average price registered at the same project during the second half of last year.'"

From City AM. "There is nothing like a stark statistic to put this into context: according to Bill Gates's article in Quartz, China has used more concrete in the last three years than the US did in the 20th century. There are just 7,758,818 tonnes of concrete in the Hoover Dam, meaning that in three years China has built the equivalent of 838 Hoover Dams at the rate of about 23.25 a month."

"Except China hasn't been investing this concrete in intergalactic infrastructure or hydro-electric power. Instead, in part, the concrete usage has gone towards swathes of empty houses. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, around one in five houses in Chinese cities was empty in 2013 (22.4 per cent) - which works out as 49m homes in urban areas alone. This is almost twice the number of homes there are in the UK, which is around 25m."

"Some of that concrete went into building a version of Paris, complete with Eiffel Tower and a Versailles fountain. The town was supposed to hold 10,000 people but instead is home to around 1,000. There is also a deserted mall, one of the biggest on earth, where toy shops wait days to sell a single toy. And Kangbashi: a ghost city meant to house a million people but home to a mere 70,000. Despite the empty metropolises, China is still building."

From Quartz. "Back in 2009, China’s 8,500 listed companies were in much better shape than their global peers. No longer. The average Chinese company now has worse cash flows and more debt than other similar firms elsewhere in the world, says Standard & Poor’s. So great has China’s borrowing binge been that its companies racked up $14.2 trillion in debt at the end of 2013, blowing past the US’s $13.1 trillion to become the world’s biggest corporate borrower. This, says S&P, is worrying since a 'higher risk for China’s borrowers means higher risk for the world.'"

"In late 2008, China’s leaders opened the lending taps, pumping huge sums of credit into the system via state-owned banks. Much of that went into growth-juicing sectors like real estate, shipbuilding, and steelmaking. The timing was bad; China’s economic growth had already peaked in 2007, and was starting to slow. As Chinese companies expanded their ability to produce—building new factories, buying more land, and the like—they created a excess of supply that began to drive down prices. Then the slowing economy hurt cash flows even more."

'But instead of letting companies default, leaders kept pumping more money into the system. Though these problems became too big to ignore last year, they keep getting worse. That could hurt the global economy, says S&P. 'As the world’s second largest national economy, any significant reverse for China’s corporate sector could quickly spread to other countries,' it notes in a report."

"Unfortunately, Chinese corporate borrowing isn’t really slowing down. S&P says that, by 2018, Middle Kingdom companies will have issued between $21.9 trillion and $23.9 trillion in debt—equal to one-third of global corporate debt, including refinancing and new issues. That implies an average annual increase of between 7.5% and 9%—much faster than China’s economy is able to grow."