1. At an unfinished Country Garden residential complex on the outskirts of the northern Chinese metropolis of Tianjin, construction has slowed to a dull whirr and a few idle workers roam a near-empty site. "They haven't paid us since Chinese New Year (in January). We are all worried," said a laborer surnamed Wang, 50, who said he had stopped work at the Yunhe Shangyuan site last week. The sprawling complex is one of two projects Reuters visited last week in Tianjin, a port city of 14 million people about 135 km (84 miles) southeast of Beijing. Both sites are run by Country Garden, China's largest developer by sales volume before this year, now mired in a debt crisis threatening to spill over to the wider economy. Construction had partially or fully stopped at both sites - the larger one with a few rows of unfinished five-storey apartment blocks and the other with lifeless cranes and thick green scaffolding hanging over skeletal high-rises. Workers at dorms on the sites complained of months without pay. (Source: reuters.com)
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