As of the end of August, the combined floor area of unsold homes stood at 648 million square metres (7 billion square feet), the latest data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) show.
That would be equal to 7.2 million homes, according to Reuters calculations, based on the average home size of 90 square metres.
"How many vacant homes are there now?
Each expert gives a very different number, with the most extreme believing the current number of vacant homes are enough for 3 billion people," said He Keng, 81, a former deputy head of the statistics bureau.
"All sorts of comments predicting the collapse of China's economy keep surfacing every now and then, but what has collapsed is such rhetoric, not China's economy," a spokesperson at the foreign ministry said at a recent news conference.
Persons:
Keng, Albee Zhang, Ryan Woo, Jan Harvey
Organizations:
China Evergrande, HK, Garden Holdings, National Bureau of Statistics, China News Service, Thomson
Locations:
BEIJING, China, Dongguan