We’ve seen videos of high-rise apartments with huge balconies circulating on social media – alongside the claim that China is making it mandatory for all new apartments to have large balconies. 
Most of the comments we have seen appear to be taking this claim at face value, some commenting on the perceived luxury of having large open spaces within apartments while others bemoan the lack of similar legislation in their own countries. A small minority of comments, on the other hand, have asked if the videos are AI or digitally altered. We took a closer look at the facts to see if the claim is true.
After some research, we found that although recent posts claim to show “newly approved” buildings under a “recent” mandatory balcony rule, most of the videos have been circulating online for years.
One of the most viral clips can be easily traced to a specific development in Chengdu, the Qiyi City Forest Garden, which was completed in 2018. It gained widespread coverage for its “vertical forest” concept, and similar buildings (featuring large, staggered balconies) have been built over the past decade both in China and around the world.
The other viral clip shows another set of apartment blocks with similarly large balconies, although they look newly built and partially unoccupied. 
From what we could find, the original clip was actually first posted to Instagram in 2023 (nearly three years ago) and is of another apartment project in Chengdu called 成都天府新区空中花园 (Chengdu Tianfu New Area Sky Garden). Similar clips of the same project can be found on Chinese-language platforms such as BilliBilli from 2022 onwards.
Other images accompanying this claim that are actually of buildings in Kuala Lumpur and Vietnam have been mislabelled as part this new wave of apartments in China.
However, while the clips are not new, has there actually been a newly introduced mandate for apartments in China to include large balconies?
This claim seems to have stemmed from a May 2025 update to national standards for residential buildings released by China’s Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development. These amendments include an increased minimum ceiling height, more focus on “green practices and smart design,” and enhanced sound insulation standards. 
However, notably, there is no sign of a “mandatory large balcony” as the recent claims suggest – neither could we find any other laws or standards that have a similar or comparable requirement.
While more housing developments in China are moving towards “fourth generation houses” (which tend to feature large, open balconies), they are not the only type of apartments being built in China. Rather, it appears that English-language accounts have taken older clips of existing apartments and reposted them with misleading and inaccurate details. We therefore give this claim a rating of false.
The high volume of reposts we have seen (spread around Reddit, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook and X) meant that our search for the original clips and context was difficult. The glut of inaccurate information in this case almost drowned out the facts, particularly as details about China’s new national standards for residential buildings were largely in Chinese.
It is important to be careful about claims such as this which do not provide context or official sources, and instead rely on virality or language barriers to gain traction and spread misinformation.
