My hometown is Wujin, Changzhou, the second city this post described. I lived there for almost 20 years. It has never been a ghost city as I known. It is always flourishing. If this place will be called ghost city, I don't know how you describe most United States cities.
Actually he claims they used to be ghost cities: "Below are five new cities in China that have advanced through the ghost city phase and have come to life."
The preceding paragraphs before that line all attack the press concept of the Chinese ghost city though, so in the context of that line, ghost city is meaning 'normal city still under construction' rather than 'giant Potemkin village never to be filled'.
I'm currently living about 5km away from Zhujiang in Guangzhou, numbered two in the article.
I'm actually surprised to hear that it was previously a ghost city, it's been a very busy spot since I was first over here around 5 years ago. It's also a little strange to hear it called a "city", it's more of a district in the centre in what was already a very large city.
Location is the key. The places listed in the article are all "new districts" of growing major cities, so they will be filled as planed. But not all major cities are actually growing, or growing as fast as planners hoped. And no official will admit their city is not growing, so as new districts are being build, some of them are going to be ghost ones.
However, the real ghost cities are mostly not going to be the ones you see in the media, for the reason of not shiny enough. If a project is on the failing trail, both the government and the developer will try to back off, to cut loses. So if you see the buildings are properly finished and streets well maintained, just lacking people, then it means the government and developers have not lost hope, and usually they have some good reasons.
I feel like the idea of the Chinese "ghost city" is just plain false. You can label any new development this way. A typical housing development could have the title "Crazy Americans Build Ghost Houses". This is just urban planning and development being implemented.
> This is just urban planning and development being implemented.
I feel like this is the origin of it. In the US, we seem to take a much more short term view of "urban planning" - rather than being laid out up front to support high density, cities more typically grow via low density sprawl on demand.
The idea of having a city (or district) constructed from the ground up to efficiently meet the needs of citizens 15 years in the future is alien to most of us. The context in which we typically encounter large groups of vacant buildings and empty streets is one in which something has gone wrong, which I think is why we find the "ghost city" narrative compelling.
Pudong was never a ghost city either. A more complete sample would be desirable. How about South China Mall? That was one of the prime examples, wasn't it?
The "ghost city" phenomenon always seemed like a good headline, ignoring the real building tragedy going on: poor quality housing, poor city planning, poor urban facilities. I see massive developments going on around me and yes, for a long time they are empty and ghostlike. they slowly fill up, and the urban centers become that bit more unliveable, that bit more crowded etc.
“The ghost city of Dantu has been mostly empty for over a decade,” Business Insider reported. “In most neighborhoods of Dantu, there are no cars, no signs of life,” reported the Daily Mail. Both of these claims were made from looking at dated satellite images that showed the new district while it was still a construction site, not from reporters who actually went there.
Yes our news media likes to hype up anything China these days. The problem with overdevelopment is not that the cities remain empty, it is the debts that come with them (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-01-04/china-s-ci...). I can imagine many Chinese cities with flashy buildings are deep in debt, American style.
currently in Shenzhen - my reaction has been that there are these beutiful malls and buildings that are being built but som feel empty. Sure you could chock it up to an overzelous goverment pouring money into development but you might also take a look at malls in the US that are now empty. The counter examples though are numerous. There are many areas that feel incredibly vibrant, full of buzz and people. The amount of consumerism in China shocked me, even as an American...
>Today, the real-estate situation in Ordos has turned macabre. Video billboards along the city's major roadways display mug shots of fugitive developers who have skipped town, fleeing their debts. There are rumors about the dynamiting of buildings in Kangbashi: about owners of unoccupied apartment towers who hope to create value through destruction, reselling freshly cleared land to new investors.
The NYT piece itself is much more carefully hedged. The TL;DR by the reporter: "IN SHORT, ORDOS is not empty, but it is odd"
A real estate bust implies that investors lost money but not necessarily a ghost town. Anyway the Ordos story was a lot more market driven than the other ones: for a while when coal price was dear Ordos boasted the highest per capita income in all of China. Also land is a lot cheaper in this unpopulated area.
Developers in China that focus on 2nd and 3rd tier cities are doing very poorly right now. The problem is that property became a speculative investment and an inflation hedge, but true demand has yet to materialize. The people who need housing can't afford these apartments, those that can afford them don't need to live there. Ugh.
Yeah they need the property tax real bad so at least investors will be incentivized to rent out their property instead of keeping their apartments vacant.
China is a big place, and the original article is a puff peice. I could see all the places described here growing furiously, while dozens more cities are lying empty and abandoned.
The Wikipedia census data for Ordos is from 2010, i.e. well before the 2013 article. The ghost city proper is Kangbashi, a new development within Ordos intended to house 300,000 people. In early 2015, the population was estimated at 100,000, admittedly growing but still very much in keeping with the title ghost town.[1]
Building an empty city from scratch and then populating it sounds utopian, and people are pretty skeptical of utopian thinking these days. But I guess it makes sense under China's combination of rapid urbanization and central planning.
The current narrative in the u.s. press, including the tech press, is that china is somewhat backward and uncompetitive. Some people even still call them communist. When the reality is quite different, with cutting edge research, products, technology coming out every day.
There are cities in china you've never even heard of that have populations bigger than most major u.s. cities. In something like 50 years the Chinese went from a poor 3rd world country to 1st world, pulling over 500 million people out of poverty and into the middle class.
The u.s. view is stuck in the 1960s-80s view of China. Even the chinese food in the u.s. is old-fashioned and not modern compared to what's in China now.
> In something like 50 years the Chinese went from a poor 3rd world country to 1st world, pulling over 500 million people out of poverty and into the middle class.
So did the Soviet Union. The thing is, you can only have an Industrial Revolution once.
> Even the chinese food in the u.s. is old-fashioned and not modern compared to what's in China now.
Chinese-American cuisine is completely separate from what's eaten in China and must be understood as its own cultural entity.
> In June 1992, Comrade Jiang Zemin explicitly put forward the concept of "socialist market economic system" for the first time on the basis of Comrade Deng Xiaoping’s southern talk.
Socialist market economy. If the government says it, that means it isn't an oxymoron.
Money quote:
> As Comrade Deng Xiaoping pointed out, "The essence of socialism is to liberate and develop productivity, to eliminate exploitation and polarization, and ultimately achieve common prosperity." The ultimate goal of the reform of socialist market economic system also points to "common prosperity". Therefore China should continue to shape its path for structural reform by this goal. Two aspects of China's economic reform are thus highlighted. The first is to further enhance the efficiency of the market by introducing market mechanisms, and the second is to provide better public service by reforming the means of planned economy, improving the capacity of macro-control and facilitating transformation of government functions since the capacity of public service provision is the primary ability in building a society of "common prosperity".
Market mechanisms in a planned economy. Macro-control (implying micro-invisible hand, I suppose). Common prosperity.
Eh, I snark, but it's an interesting experiment. I just wish it weren't being run in a context where there's no ethics review board.
The Soviet Union was, by definition, a "second world" country. First and third world do not mean "rich" and "poor". They refer to political alignment with the United States (first), USSR (second), or unaligned (third world).
> First and third world do not mean "rich" and "poor".
They do now, in this post-1991 world.
> They refer to political alignment with the United States (first), USSR (second), or unaligned (third world).
So China was Third World in 1990? That's not going to be very defensible, except in terms of the definition you just gave, which lost all relevance in 1991.
My point is, the meanings of the words have changed, and trying to use them in their original sense now is just perverse. The original sense was predicated on a political reality which is now gone.
If you mean rich, say rich. If you mean poor, say poor. There are already perfectly good words for those exact concepts, and they're not "first" and "third world". Popular ignorance of the actual meanings of those terms does not change anything.
What is perverse is the widespread abuse of long-established academic terms with precise and well known meanings as co-opted euphemisms because one is too embarassed to simply say "rich" or "poor" when that is what one in fact means.
Of course not, they evolve over time according to decentralized usage (not necessarily from ignorance.) However, this does not imply that anything anyone says is just as valid as any other, nor that any proposed meaning shift enacted by any small group ought to be immediately and unquestioningly accepted by everyone else. Others are also perfectly free to reject the proposal and continue to use the old meaning -- and to advocate for this, too. Only time will tell which group wins.
Just as words sometimes change meaning, there are many more cases where some people provisionally use a word with a new meaning, but this new meaning fails to take hold and vanishes. This happens when enough other people fail to adopt the proposed new meaning, and stick to the old meaning.
In this case, I am one of those people, and I am encouraging others to do the same. I believe I have very good reasons, and I am sharing them.
Redefining first and third world to mean "rich" and "poor" is unnecessary since we already have words for those meanings, and we have no other convenient words for what "first world" and "third world" conventionally mean in their original usage.
The desire to redefine them is in my opinion solely motivated by the desire for a euphemism to say something "nicer" sounding than "poor." Well, "poor" is not a nice thing; it's never going to sound nice. That desire is merely the euphemism treadmill at work. if you are going to call a group "poor," at least have the decency to say so directly rather than trying to hide behind a euphemism.
Besides, we have no other convenient words to say "aligned with capitalism during the Cold War" and "unaligned with either capitalism or Communism."
I agree there's a lot of missunderstanding about China in the Western press. To be fair though, the ruling party in China does still call itself Communits, and vigorously advertises itself as such.
In something like 50 years the Chinese went from a poor 3rd world country to 1st world,
China is regarded as 1st world now? My understanding is that the economic advances has been limited to a portion of the population and a big chunk of the population is still quite rural and poor.
I never understood the criticism over one child policy. Had it not been for that policy, the population of China could well be over 2 billion by now. Is this something the rest of the world wanted? Sure it's cruel and not fair to some of the families, but considering the alternative, I'd argue this is something that has to be done.
While I completely agree, the one child policy hasn't been without its problems.
For example, the number of boys Vs. girls in China is likely going to result in either a civil war or worse another international conflict 20 years from now. An extremely unhappy population is not constructive for world peace (or even inter-China peace).
I am extremely concerned about that powder keg and everyone else should be too. What does a society do with a bunch of unhappy 20 something males typically?
And three very prominent opponents of Malthus are Marx, Engels and Lenin.
The one child policy is not particularly communist.
edit - Also, China has an insanely long literary history, if I was going to place bets I'd start looking for the sources of the one-child policy somewhere in there before going to people like Malthus or Marx. That said, the policy is without a doubt far more Malthusian than it is Marxist.
I don't see any "ghost city" here. That's hard working people building a new prosperous city from scratch. IMO a "ghost city" would be cities that is not as popular as before, not some place that had never become a city.
