The Role Of Nepali Hill-Stations In The Chinese Housing Boom

The air pollution in China, once it gets to the point of becoming thick smog, has a convenient function: to hide a portion of the tall apartment towers from the pedestrians who are in the mood to problematize China, or hiding the tower's tops from a western economist interested in understanding the status of housing development and purchasing patterns there. Hence the towers look much smaller, making the housing development look properly managed, and whether the tops of these towers are inhabited or not becomes harder to know.

Meanwhile the Chinese tourist travels to Nepal to enjoy the morning mist and fog in Nepali hill-stations, and see the morning mist and fog as equivalent to the smog in the cities where they have purchased their homes. With this comparison between natural mist and harmful smog, the level of discontent with the environment is reduced, and a potential protest against the environment avoided. The environmental beauty in one place helps to reduce anger with environmental degradation in another, and sadly the polluted environment remains uncleaned because the clean environments don't serve as 'role-models' to be learned from but only offset the discontent felt at pollution elsewhere.

The first signs of western and suburban housing booms are the clues of oversupply in the housing market. Whether there is oversupply or not can be established by flying over the suburbs and observing if there seems to be too many houses in a certain place. The western economist may get a hunch or feeling that there are more houses than necessary in that place. Yet the pleasure felt at the picturesque, clean and uninhabited suburbs to the eye of the western economist may soften his/her judgment on the oversupply or boom of suburban houses. The western economist's reporting on the oversupply and/or boom in beautiful suburbs may not be very harsh because the beauty has had an impact on him/her.

On the other hand, there will be much more of a problem in China where the housing boom is not as picturesque as the suburbs, and instead may look hostile. The Chinese economist will never be in the mood to give a less harsh report on the housing market if he/she encounters smog when looking at the apartment towers. One way to lessen the Chinese economist's anger at the housing market is to have him/her travel to Nepal's hill-stations and see the morning mist/fog, so that he/she may then evoke this positive image of natural fog when he/she sees a scene of the smog from atop the uninhabited apartment tower in a Chinese city.