CHINA'S 'GHOST' CITIES

News & Politics
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The primary reason why “ghost towns” have popped up all over china is because over the past decade plus there has been a strong incentive by local governments to finance real estate construction. Another contributing factor to the real estate construction binge in China is the lack of investment options for the bulk of China’s population [1] which creates inflated demand for real estate as a “store of value” beyond its intrinsic purpose as a shelter.

As they say, “real estate is local” and that is no different in China. The projects were sponsored by thousands upon thousands of local governments that spanned the entire spectrum of competencies, corruption levels, leadership personalities and local economies (i.e. supporting tax base).

As a result, you end up with a wide variety of projects and outcomes. Many projects were very successful, some less successful and others have (thus far) been fantastically unsuccessful. The “fantastically unsuccessful” ones are the “ghost towns” you see and likely the result of high levels of incompetence and/or corruption as well as the occasional local government that is flush with so much cash that it can’t find enough ways to spend it all (Ordos, deep in China’s coal country, is an example of this).

Another reason is virtually all buildings in China were built in the same way. The buildings did not meet the minimum safety requirements; they weren’t designed to address the needs of a modern society; they were dirty, difficult to control, and not least they were ugly buildings.
In a word, with the economic boom, it became clear that China could no longer be represented by these buildings covered with dirty white tiles. The emerging Chinese middle class could no longer live under certain conditions.

This plan that runs parallel to the Chinese project to empty rural areas to thicken the population in large urban centres (in China today there are more than 100 cities with more than 1 million inhabitants, and not for the population growth, which in fact is ageing abruptly, but simply because millions of migrant workers left the countryside) naturally inflamed the real estate market, which has greatly contributed to the growth of the Chinese GDP.

Given that Chinese build these new districts not for fun but because they are simply following their five-year plans of urban development involving the movement of oceanic masses of people from countryside to city, each so, perhaps more frequently than expected, some of these projects will fail, leaving only abandoned buildings with them, huge holes in local budgets, and often leaving countless citizens who had invested their savings or turned on mortgages to buy these glittering apartments.

Si tuambiwe twende tukaishi huko.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TiTDU8MZRYw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tO6A7G1TwOI

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This story is so outdated. In fact, wakija watasema hii tuliona enzi za Kenyanlist.com!

Many of these used to be ghost cities immediately after sprouting up. And That was many years back. They are not anymore, today. Most are occupied and as vibrant as modern cities would be.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2018/03/19/ghost-towns-or-boomtowns-what-new-cities-really-become/amp/

Ghost Towns Or Boomtowns? What New Cities Really Become
EDITOR’S PICK
Wade ShepardContributor
Mar 19, 2018,8:00 pm• 5,168 views•#ScalingUp

The sun rises over the skyline of the Lujiazui Financial District along the Huangpu River in Shanghai on February 4, 2018. (Photo credit: JOHANNES EISELE/AFP/Getty Images)

Thirty years ago hardly anybody other than a Shanghai local would have found any reason to mutter the word “Pudong.” At that time, the place where the vibrant financial center that we know today now sits — the iconic skyline of the city – simply didn’t exist. To tell someone back then that the uninviting mud flats on the other side of the Huangpu river would someday sprout a fertile thicket of skyscrapers that would house the headquarters of the world’s largest and most distinguished financial institutions and companies would have been laughable.

In fact, many did laugh. For many years after the core of Pudong’s financial district was erected, the skyscrapers sat empty — the steel and glass husks of an unrequited dream of development. International observers and onlookers jeered — the place was the laughingstock of Shanghai. Milton Friedman even called the it “a statist monument for a dead pharaoh on the level of the pyramids.” In response to these critics, Mayor Xu Kuangdi admitted that Pudong was like buying a suit a few sizes too big for a growing boy. But the Pudong financial district eventually grew up — now boasting occupancy rates in the ballpark of 99% – and nobody laughs about it being a ghost town anymore.

When I first began my two-year tour of many of China’s so-called “ghost cities” in the spring of 2012 I expected to find vast seas of empty high-rise apartments, barren roadways and shopping malls that were dead on arrival with a background soundtrack made up of echoes, gusts of wind and the sound of my own footsteps. In the beginning, I imagined that I was on the trail of an Atlantean narrative about a society that built too much too fast, and whose arrogant disregard for the laws of economic fundamentals would be its tragic undoing.

Nighttime in Ordos Kangbashi. The ghost city claims have been mostly over-hyped.CARLA HAJJAR

But that wasn’t the story that I found. The more underpopulated new cities that I traveled to the more the big picture emerged of a story that was more complex than any mythology-inspired parallel could explain. New city building in China wasn’t just an engineering pursuit but a complete socio-economic experiment of unprecedented scale. It was less about cashing in on constructing new developments than it was priming new economic engines that could create and sustain additional growth, all while curbing the stark social and economic disparity between the east of the country and the west. Using the full gamut of financing, engineering and administrative tools available, China engaged in a full-scale national shake-up, as more than a hundred large-scale urbanization projects were carried out to fruition, being populated with companies, institutions and residents – by guile and fiat. Virtually overnight, former backwaters like Chengdu, Chongqing, Wuhan, Xi’an, Kunming and Guiyang emerged as China’s best performing cities, being relaunched with revitalized historic cores paired with shiny new areas that boasted high-tech R&D centers, modern shopping malls, new airports, high-speed rail stations, sprawling industrial zones, and more middle-class housing than anyone could really have any use for.

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You have gone to only one website talking about one city and you have concluded there are no ‘ghost’ cities.Read those other websites.

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Tens of millions of empty apartments in brand new cities all over China, deserted cinemas and quiet parks. It is an image that has captured the public imagination: ‘ghost cities’ have become a popular China topic in international media. American author Wade Shepard spent the past few years touring these new territories for his book Ghost Cities of China (2015). Earlier this year, he came to Beijing’s Bookworm Literary Festival to speak about his project with New York Times reporter Dan Levin. Tickets to attend the event were sold out soon; everybody seems curious to know more about the modern phenomenon of ‘ghost cities’. “The term ‘ghost cities’ is actually not appropriate,” Shepard tells Levin: “Ghost cities are places that once lived and then died. What I write about is new places that are underpopulated, and where houses are dark at night.” Shepard explains that most of China’s ‘ghost cities’ actually do have people living in them. The ones that don’t, are still under construction: “These new underpopulated cities are built by world luxury developers who are working on constructing new urban utopias all over China. The people living in these cities come from various places. Some are trendy people who are looking to live in a new city. Others have been relocated from their original villages. There are many from the countryside.”

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The chinese are smarter than you think. You will soon see what those cities are for. Also the railroad that you payed the to build for themselves

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Chinese are crazy.how do you copy london add snow and a statue of Churchill?

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They con African idiotic leaders with overpriced development structures to finance their ghost cities.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QG2ISrdjsjc

There are even some of those “ghosts” imported to Africa.

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Those ghost cities have infrastructure better than some of the best parts of Nairobi

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Lawd, they even duplicated Chicago right down to a silver glassed Sears Tower:D:D:D:D:D:D:D

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there were ghost cities in 2014,15 but there are not there anymore. Read about Ordos today. As you were told,you are a bit outdated.

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True. Btw.In as much as I hate the Chinese brand of politics, the hukou system(which predates Communist China) is a system we should have emulated.We would have never had slums in our cities. Like in this era of devolution, we would restrict rural urban migration to Nairobi and divert it to the county headquarters i.e Nyeri, Migori, Garissa, so that those places can grow into cities in their own right.
The reason why the ghost cities are filling up is because migrant workers are being denied residency in tier 1 and many tier 2 cities and being asked to settle in mid size cities and grow them instead.Shanghai already has tens of millions of people, it does not need more. The ghost cities which were nowhere(like that one in Inner Mongolia) are now somewhere because migrant populations have moved there.

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The Chinese population continues to increase despite the one child policy which also is subject to review next year. This empty units will get occupants soon. At least they are already done.

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The chinese will live in them in due time. The trickle of chinese you are seeing now will become a flood.

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Hio ya Angola people have moved into those houses, not sure if the occupancy is full though.

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If we could get some of that infrastructure and houses in Msa, Ksm, Nkr, Nairobi or even Isiolo, ingekuwa poa sana. Though the size of our economy might not allow it.

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It’s better to build that much cities for residents than none at all. The Chinese look far into the future, not now and plan accordingly.

The same things that were said about those cities is the same thing being said about SGR. They called them white elephants, but these guys are looking into the future, not now.

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Kwanza hizi estates mzee za kanjo need to be demolished and redeveloped into high rise high occupancy estates. In fact the whole of inner Nairobi to a radius of 5km should be full of apartments and flats. Ukitaka kujijengea bungalow ama mansion enda outskirts past 10km radius.

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you have to give it up for china, a country with over a billion in population, and can still have empty cities, sisi hapa tuko 40 million lakini…ata wacha nisiendelee

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Those Chinese need to build us a ghost city too so that we can relocate all the Kibera and Mathare takataka.