Architecture Students’ Crisis in China and Hong Kong
Symptoms of decline within China’s architectural industry began to emerge as early as 2017, in large part due to broader economic downturn within the country’s real estate market. In the last two years, apprehension within the industry peaked amid successive bankruptcies of several of the country’s largest developers. In 2021, the Evergrande Group (中國恒大集團) defaulted on their debts. This was followed by Country Garden (碧桂園), which defaulted on their offshore debts in 2024. The fear of a real estate collapse in China rippled through the country’s architecture schools. Last year, an eye-catching online rumor revealed that most of Wuhan University’s first-year architecture students had quit the program, reducing the class size from 40-50 to just four, due to fears over poor job prospects. Online rumors notwithstanding, there is growing evidence of shrinking interest in the discipline of architecture in mainland China.
The architectural industry in China is restructuring at the expense of its youngest recruits and adversely affecting markets long dependent upon mainland China’s economic growth, particularly Hong Kong. The role of the architect in contemporary China and Hong Kong, and the meaning of practice in both places, are undergoing profound changes that will shape the coming decades of Chinese architectural design, which has grown over the past forty years to become the world’s largest design market. A closer look at the young graduates facing these shifts offers insight into the nature of the crisis and the opportunities it might present for the profession and architectural education in mainland China and Hong Kong more generally.
The Chinese Crisis
The roots of China’s real estate crisis can be traced back to the global financial crisis of 2008, which forced the Chinese government to invest four trillion yuan into the economy through nation-wide infrastructural projects including a high-speed railway network and other transit-oriented developments. The Keynesian infrastructural expansion employed workers and economic resources, keeping the country’s economic growth rate buoyant for the next decade. Improved regional connectivity stimulated local real estate markets that previously had been inaccessible to city dwellers. Developers took advantage of the property boom by taking out loans disproportionate to their assets, building large-scale housing estates around the country as quickly as possible. It is estimated that the Evergrande group owed investors 300 billion USD at the time of its collapse in 2021. Few questioned the system as long as the apartments were selling, which encouraged developers to build as quickly as possible in order to recoup their debt and further leverage their assets. The system collapsed when housing supply far outstripped market demand, to the point that property prices inflated to an unaffordable level for most Chinese households. In 2021, the property price index of China peaked at 27.89, meaning that average house prices were equivalent to 27.89 years of an average household’s income—a number far out of reach for many of the country’s young adults. To some, this constituted a property bubble a decade-long in the making (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Due to the overexpansion of China's real estate sector in the past years, there have been vacant estates dubbed ghost towns. An example is this abandoned residential complex in the Chenggong district, Kunming, Yunnan, photographed in 2011. Chinaunderground/ Wikimedia Commons.
Architects were willing participants in the country’s construction boom. The booming market fueled business expansion, necessitating the employment of more architects. In Chinese universities, the country’s eight most reputable architecture departments ranked among China’s most competitive and desirable destinations for academic study. Architects also boasted of some of the best job prospects in the country. The field’s popularity was even registered within the realm of reality television; in 2022, Tencent produced a workplace reality show called An Exciting Offer featuring the architectural industry, after three previous seasons featuring prestigious careers in law and medicine. Produced in the middle of a national economic downturn, the season focused on architects was the show’s least popular.
In 2024, the collapse of industry stalwarts such as Evergrande, Country Garden, and Vanke exposed the extent of rampant overleveraging within the country’s real estate market and invited public and official scrutiny of the entire design and construction industry. Evergrande and Country Garden were liquidated after missing payments to Chinese onshore bondholders, while Vanke languished in losses and unpaid debt. Caught in the vortex of a plummeting property market, the future of the architecture profession went from one of China’s most promising to one of its grimmest. Chen Guoen, an architectural student who participated in An Exciting Offer, contemplated quitting the profession to search for a more stable income in the civil services (Figure 2). His perspective resonated with other young workers who found the industry conditions increasingly untenable despite being passionate about architecture.
Figure 2. Chen Guoen, a participant of the Chinese workplace reality show, An Exciting Offer, and an architecture student, contemplating on changing careers from the discipline. Tencent.
For some, these decisions have meant the casting aside of years of education to pursue training in new skills such as coding. Others have opted for adjacent careers in environmental, social, and governance (ESG) consultancy for building projects. At the same time, it has led to unusual synchronicities with contemporary American architecture, where students have long been told that their pursuit of architecture may not necessarily lead to monetary rewards. The American architect Thom Mayne’s appearance on An Exciting Offer signaled a jarring cultural contradiction in this respect, insofar as his exhortations that young Chinese architects consider their work more akin to that of a musician went against the industry’s own messaging, honed over years of rapid, government-championed, physical growth. Mayne’s firm, Morphosis, was one of the international firms that profited from China’s construction boom, having previously completed the Giant Interactive Group Headquarters in Shanghai (2010), Hanking Center Tower in Shenzhen (2020), and Yangtze River International Conference Center in Nanjing (2021).
By 2024, even top schools like Tsinghua University failed to enroll a full class of architecture students. Last year, less than 20 students identified architecture as their first choice for study. At Chongqing University, another one of China’s eight most reputable architecture schools, admission requirements for architecture went from the university’s most to least competitive. At Southeast University, another one of the eight, students had to be lured into landscape architecture with promises of a master’s degree alongside their undergraduate degree (保研).
Reverberations in Hong Kong
China’s real estate boom has spilled over to the economies of its special administration regions, particularly Hong Kong, with similarly devasting effects on the profession of architecture. Over the past 45 years, Hong Kong’s architects have reaped the benefits of China’s economic reforms and growth. Over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, Hong Kong emerged as Greater China’s design capital, with a degree of international exposure and technical expertise considered vital for Chinese development. Mainland Chinese commissions flooded into Hong Kong’s firms, including Dennis Lau & Ng Chun Man Architects & Engineers (HK) Ltd and Ronald Lu & Partners. Housing towers, shopping malls, and transit stations designed by Hong Kong’s architects became typological anchors in many of China’s booming cities, while Hong Kong design offices opened satellite offices throughout China in pursuit of large-scale, high-profile design work.
China’s architectural influence in Hong Kong was not limited to direct commissions. Mainland Chinese investors also had an impact on Hong Kong’s real estate market, which has long been seen as the more secure investment option in comparison to mainland China. Beginning in the 1970s through the 2000s, Chinese investors, including the Chinese Communist Party itself, became heavily invested in Hong Kong property, pushing up both value and demand. In 2010, property buyers with Mandarin pinyin English names (synonymous with mainland Chinese investors) comprised 9%, or more than 10,000, of Hong Kong’s total property transactions. The number has climbed since then as both the Hong Kong and mainland Chinese governments pursue further, collaborative growth within the Greater Bay Area.
At the same time, however, and particularly as the Chinese economy has waned, Chinese and Hong Kong officials have worked to tighten restrictions on cross-border investments with mainland Chinese capital in the Hong Kong market (Figure 3). According to the 2020 guidelines set by the State Administration of Foreign Exchange, Chinese citizens have been limited to transfers totaling no more than 50,000 USD or 380,000 HKD per year, a small fraction of the downpayment required for an average Hong Kong apartment. To avoid such restrictions, investors have relied upon friends and relatives to help transfer additional capital into Hong Kong, but in recent years authorities have cracked down on this strategy. In response to limited mainland Chinese investment, Hong Kong’s real estate market has begun to contract; in 2024, it dropped by two-thirds of its 2023 volume. These factors have negatively affected design and construction in Hong Kong. Earlier this year, for example, one local construction company, Hip Seng Contracting Company Limited, closed its doors and terminated its workers. Other construction workers have experienced similar hardships, including four to five months of unpaid wages (Figure 4).
“The architectural industry in China is restructuring at the expense of its youngest recruits.”
Figure 3. As local developers are strapped on cash, they issued discounts to newly built housing estates, attracting an oversubscription of interests. This is a recent example, Sierra Sea developed by San Hung Kai Properties, attracting an oversubscription of 66 times in the April launch. The banner writes that Sierra Sea has made history by selling out in 6 rounds of sales. 樓行睇盤/ Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1BoJSibKrF/
Figure 4. Another construction company, Chi Fu Construction Co, owed wages to its construction workers. Some were seen protesting with banners in Sham Shui Po district in January this year, requesting the payment of owed wages. Photograph by the author, 2025.
Architecture in Hong Kong: A Glimpse into the Future
Hong Kong’s architects are facing unprecedented challenges. In early 2025, downsizing efforts within two local architectural offices made the local news. Last year, Dennis Lau architects demanded their staff take three days of unpaid leave every month, effectively leading to a 10% salary cut. Early this year, Roland Lu architects also delayed salary reviews and promotions (Figure 5). The downsizing has had a more significant impact on the industry’s recent architectural graduates and pre-licensed architectural assistants, as firms have become reluctant to invest in future talents. Large local companies used to open 20-30 new positions for local graduates on an annual basis; available positions of this year were reduced to 10-20% of previous years. It is estimated that in 2025, one-sixth of Hong Kong’s architectural graduates will land job offers this year. These events are particularly surprising, given the long-established reputations of the two architectural firms, sometimes known as the four or five largest architecture offices in Hong Kong (四大/五大則樓). The impact of the industry’s collapse may then be debilitating to the city’s lesser-known practices.
Figure 5. Screengrab of internal email from Ronald Lu & Partners (top; Mingpao) and from DLN Architects Limited (bottom; LIHKG/ Vision Times).
The difficulties faced by recent mainland and Hong Kong architectural graduates are prompting the expansion of a field and form of expertise into other disciplines. Recent graduates are capitalizing on e-commerce platforms such as Etsy to market their own products and monetization platforms like Patreon to sell their knowledge and expertise. Those who have decided to stay in the industry are seeking commissions outside Hong Kong and mainland China; one recent graduate was recruited to work for a Hong Kong-based developer on projects in Dubai. Others are pursuing public sector jobs in the architectural services department.
There is evidence that architectural schools have provided graduates with some insight into how they might redefine themselves in a shifting profession at an uncertain time. At the same time, however, architectural education in Hong Kong and mainland China has reinforced narratives of architectural autonomy and creative genius at a time in which the profession has operated within the parameters of very different economic logic. Declining wages and mediocre working conditions resulting from macroeconomic, overarching structures of power remain largely unaccounted for in architectural education in both Hong Kong or mainland China, even as they have been central to the profession’s expansion and prosperity in the previous twenty years. Today’s architectural graduates are victims of decisions made before their time, by people accustomed to different management models and market realities. This notion of predetermination has generated hopelessness among young professionals within Hong Kong and mainland China, encapsulated in the tangping or “lying flat” phenomenon. To motivate young generations to join the industry, the Greater China’s architectural industry must redefine itself around a different set of professional goals, values, and ethics.
Schools can become experimental grounds where students might begin to learn how to regain control of their own education and professional futures. In this regard, mainland China and Hong Kong design professionals might learn from change that has already started in other parts of the world. For example, at the Department of the Ongoing at the Chair of Affective Architectures in ETH Zurich, students such as Faiq Mari and Santiago Del Hierro have created what they call a collaborative platform “for and by students.” The collaboration features a student-led seminar titled “unmasking space,” aimed to curate “plural forms of spatial knowing.” The course was designed as a reaction against the narrative of lifelong professional struggle disseminated by leading design professionals such as Mayne. Starting with developing a pluralistic discourse of spatial knowledge, students can begin to develop in parallel an alternative practice of architectural design that both intervene and critique politico-economic structures of our current times. For example, Mari himself developed an online public library titled Maktabat Sabīl, encouraging users to upload (archival) materials that could be used for Palestinian studies. He envisioned the platform to be used in future architectural research to both critique dominant complicit narratives in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and support insurgent narratives and practices towards the country’s liberation.’
Figure 6. An online meme by Instagram account @hkconstructionbrawl, ridiculing the slow speed of an infamous construction company, Aggressive Construction Co. Ltd, in issuing wages to its construction workers, compared to the fast imposition of Martial Law by South Korea president Yoon Suk Yeol last year. The construction company has recently been suspended from its license by the Buildings Department. Instagram. https://www.instagram.com/p/DDH8pbeyVi9/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==
“Schools can become experimental grounds where students might begin to learn how to regain control of their own education and professional futures.”
In Hong Kong, young members of the construction industry set up the Instagram meme account @hkconstructionbrawl in 2020 to ridicule conditions of the local construction and engineering industries. It has since become an instrumental, informal platform to circulate and exchange information about the industry’s crises, such as assisting workers to navigate and make sense of the aforementioned Hip Seng collapse (Figure 6). Young people have emerged as the experts of the current world, mobilizing media and communicative platforms to articulate critiques and alternative viewpoints within a profession unaccustomed to such dissent. The perception that students are only at the receiving end of politics and economics—a perspective that remains entrenched within Chinese and Hong Kong’s architectural education and professionalization—is giving way to a new reality.
Students and young graduates should be given the opportunity to cultivate how they hope to contribute to a future architectural industry—and, by extension, a future Greater Bay Area. They should be able to test and workshop alternative ways of practice and design, which over time may yield fresh perspective and acumen that could prove to be invaluable resources in navigating the profession’s current and future crises. With the right opportunities, they may prove to be the answer to the crises rather than being merely its product.
