6 ms·

Ordos, China: The World’s Largest Ghost City (2014)

59 points by axelfontaine 11y ago

CyberDildonics 11y ago
Inner Mongolia is a region in China.
beachstartup 11y ago
i don't understand the fascination with these ghost cities. they're just giant failed businesses. imagine if they built vegas and nobody came. that's it, in a nutshell. it's not that weird.
- woah 11y ago
  Looks pretty weird to me
  - beachstartup 11y ago
    there are abandoned buildings/construction and complexes in almost every developing country i've ever been to. china just does it on a bigger scale.
    - peferron 11y ago
      Scale matters.
- tdaltonc 11y ago
  It seems super weird to me. There are not many places on earth where cities capable of holding millions are built by decree. Even fewer where they are built and then no one moves in. There are good reasons why this happens in China, but it's still super weird.
- nationcrafting 11y ago
  I think they're fascinating from a Hayekian point of view, namely that small centralised groups of directors have only a fraction of the information necessary to direct large groups, compared to dispersed but dynamic information flows you get from market economies via the price signalling system. Which explains the vast misallocation of resources and overall malinvestment. Funnily enough, the person to first advocate as little interventionism as possible for government was Chinese philosopher Laozi, who compared governing a nation to frying small fish for lunch: too much stirring and lunch is ruined.
- IkmoIkmo 11y ago
  > imagine if they built vegas and nobody came. that's it, in a nutshell. it's not that weird. That's fucking weird... I wonder on what scale it becomes weird to you. Imagine we built 100s of cities on another planet and just left it empty... I do appreciate, if this is the point you want to make, that literally every newspaper, tv station, radio show, photographer etc has done a piece on Ordos. I've read the same article a million times now and it's totally uninteresting. But that's a function of overreporting, it's still inherently interesting to me.
- dnautics 11y ago
  I've definitely looked at some of the obviously failed, mid-construction casinos in Vegas that crop up from time to time with fascination
pavlov 11y ago
"The man led us through a courtyard, around the back of the school buildings, and suddenly there it was: the yard opened up into a wide, grassy playing field, flanked on one side by raised seating. On the edge of the grass pitch – regularly mowed, yet never used – we were pointed towards a series of bronze statues. The figures showed children in traditional Chinese dress, frozen in play as the pink silk scarves tied about their necks flapped noisily in the wind. 'Fifty thousand Quai!' the man giggled, ecstatic, before explaining to us that the silk scarves were washed and replaced on a weekly basis." Apparently thousands of buildings are being maintained, cleaned, even silk scarves on statues getting washed -- for nobody to see. Who is paying the maintenance workers' wages? The local government?
- undertow 11y ago
  Not to mention the draw on electricity, which probably points back to some undisclosed amount of coal being burned in a power plant, somewhere nearby...
- IkmoIkmo 11y ago
  Likely a consortium of the developers who have 5% occupancy rates and want to sell (look up 'rent a foreigner' for another strange way developers try to sell property) and local government yeah.
presty 11y ago
isn't all this just a matter of time? https://www.bullionstar.com/blogs/koos-jansen/guest-post-5-chinese-ghost-cities-came-alive/ https://www.bullionstar.com/blogs/koos-jansen/guest-post-5-c... http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2015/04/21/the-myth-of-chinas-ghost-cities/ http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2015/04/21/the-myth-of...
- cthalupa 11y ago
  This is probably the most relevant comment in the thread. These ghost cities start that way, but they all end up being populated, and as soon as the flood gates open, they fill up fast. It just takes certain factors reaching critical mass to push them from the 'No one is living there' to 'Everyone is moving in and filling the entire place up' Edit: Looks like it's already begun in Ordos as well. http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/03/06/ordos-china-tourist-city/ http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/03/06/ordos-china-to... As usual, the initial settling is largely happening due to the Chinese government applying artificial levers to get people to move there, but that's a tactic they've used successfully on a lot of these "ghost towns"
  - iiiggglll 11y ago
    Sound like China is planning ahead. Contrast this with the American problem of nothing new being built: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-07/here-s-how-much-new-york-and-san-francisco-s-tight-housing-markets-are-hurting-the-economy http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-07/here-s-how...
    - adventured 11y ago
      That sounds fine, if it all works out as planned. China is about to become the most indebted nation. At the rapid pace they're accumulating debt, that should happen within the next few years. They've spent wildly to keep the building spree going; even now their real estate market is crashing, it has been falling for a year. It begs a simple question: how many more people can China transition out of old China's poverty, and into the new China's middle class, before they run out of the ability to accumulate more debt to keep it all going (global consumers are tapped out, which has left China's manufacturing boom dead in the water, with their PMI contracting during a supposed non-recessionary period). I fail to see how thinking ahead equates to taking on tens of trillions in new debt to fake economic growth. That sounds like they're baking up an economic recipe for future stagnation.
highCs 11y ago
The author is on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/darmonrichter?ty=h https://www.patreon.com/darmonrichter?ty=h
erikb 11y ago
While watching that let's not forget that at least in Europe we also have "ghost cities".
- danmaz74 11y ago
  I never heard of any... example?
  - lmz 11y ago
    I'm not European but: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2102074/Spain-haunted-ghost-towns-built-boom-years-unemployment-tops-5million.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2102074/Spain-haunte... although things seem to be improving there: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/350b9c8c-43f4-11e4-8abd-00144feabdc0.html http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/350b9c8c-43f4-11e4-8abd-00144feabd...
    - danmaz74 11y ago
      Thanks for the link.
ChuckMcM 11y ago
There have been other stories of "ghost towns" which eventually filled up with people. Perhaps this is just one of those. I always find it fascinating but I also note that a major disaster in a city like Beijing and there is already a bunch of places to house people post disaster. I don't know if anyone else thinks about it in that way but from a civil defense perspective it seems interesting to have "back up" cities waiting. For other Person of Interest fans I found that Ordos was a ghost town interesting from that aspect of things as well.
- nate_meurer 11y ago
  It only makes sense if the backup cities are already owned by the government. If populating those cities post-disaster requires government appropriation of an entire city's worth of private real estate assets, the resulting financial and political instability could well dwarf anything wrought by the original disaster.
  - deoptimo 11y ago
    So you think that the appropriation of unused real estate is worse than whatever disaster led to the mass exodus of a population from a major city. Interesting, but that is not how I think.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - nate_meurer 11y ago
      You have badly misread my comment.
  - ChuckMcM 11y ago
    I'm not sure I understand this comment enough to agree or disagree with it. The land etc which is Ordos today was appropriated by the state and they built a city on it. It neither destabilized nor affected the operation of the current government of China in the slightest as far as I can tell. This is the same system that decided to flood several cities so that they could build a giant dam. And while their were complaints, it really didn't do the residents much good then either. So I can't imagine a scenario in China where anything the Government chose to do, especially with the reallocation by fiat, of parts of the country to a different purpose, would result in any political instability whatsoever.
jimrandomh 11y ago
It may seem weird to have almost-empty cities, but from a different perspective, a city like that is an amazing resource. If China ever has disaster or other crisis that creates lots of refugees (think Hurricane Katrina), they have a functioning city with lots of space ready for people to go to. Which is pretty awesome, when you think about it.
- nate_meurer 11y ago
  But these don't really make very good "backup" cities. The housing isn't owned by the government. It's owned by investors, often individuals, and it serves as a sink for money that has nowhere else to go. Real estate and construction investment of this kind is one of the big drivers of the Chinese economy. If the government confiscates property on the scale you're talking about -- even if it's in response to a disaster -- the bottom would drop out of their financial markets. Ain't gonna happen, even in a disaster.
  - seanmcdirmid 11y ago
    Not to mention it's the upper middle class and rich who owns these places...the one class the government really doesn't want to piss off.
  - jimrandomh 11y ago
    I think you're giving them too little credit. The government wouldn't have to confiscate property in that scenario, they could just buy it. They're not exactly short on money.
dm2 11y ago
"Typical housing prices in Kangbashi have fallen from $1,100 to $470 per square foot, over the last five years alone." Why are the prices so high? Obviously nobody wants to pay $500k - $1 million for a 1,000 sqft. apartment in a Chinese ghost town.
- pavlov 11y ago
  That does seem insanely expensive. Maybe the price was quoted in $/m^2 and the unit was mistakenly switched to square feet at some point? An alternative explanation is that the owners of these houses don't really want to sell them at all for some reason. Maybe keeping the money tied in unsold real estate is somehow preferable to having cash or other assets, due to e.g. government housing subsidies or something?
  - seanmcdirmid 11y ago
    Nobody wants to take a loss on real estate in China, so they'll just wait until the market is better or they get compensated by the government when they eventually "redevelop" the land (those apartments only have an effective 10-20 year lifespan given quality of current construction methods). They don't take out big loans to buy these places, so there is no liquidity pressure. This is good and bad, no housing market crash but a huge zombie market of low turn over of second hand housing even in much more active first tier cities.
    - guard-of-terra 11y ago
      "those apartments only have an effective 10-20 year lifespan" Economical or political crisis hits, and they'll have to live in those apartments for 50+ years. We've been there already. How do you build an apartment block these days anyway so it just lasts 20 years? With modern materials it's a bit unexpected. It's a royally crappy idea anyway. Imagine selling one of those apartments to a person aged 40, who then promptly retires and have to live 20 years in a crumbling home or lose one and go homeless. Apartment is supposed to be a solid investment.
      - 11y ago
akandiah 11y ago
There was a great documentary done on China's empty cities done by Dateline (in Australia): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbDeS_mXMnM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbDeS_mXMnM

59 points by axelfontaine 11y ago

Inner Mongolia is a region in China.

i don't understand the fascination with these ghost cities. they're just giant failed businesses. imagine if they built vegas and nobody came. that's it, in a nutshell. it's not that weird.

woah 11y ago
Looks pretty weird to me
- beachstartup 11y ago
  there are abandoned buildings/construction and complexes in almost every developing country i've ever been to. china just does it on a bigger scale.
  - peferron 11y ago
    Scale matters.
tdaltonc 11y ago
It seems super weird to me. There are not many places on earth where cities capable of holding millions are built by decree. Even fewer where they are built and then no one moves in. There are good reasons why this happens in China, but it's still super weird.
nationcrafting 11y ago
I think they're fascinating from a Hayekian point of view, namely that small centralised groups of directors have only a fraction of the information necessary to direct large groups, compared to dispersed but dynamic information flows you get from market economies via the price signalling system. Which explains the vast misallocation of resources and overall malinvestment. Funnily enough, the person to first advocate as little interventionism as possible for government was Chinese philosopher Laozi, who compared governing a nation to frying small fish for lunch: too much stirring and lunch is ruined.
IkmoIkmo 11y ago
> imagine if they built vegas and nobody came. that's it, in a nutshell. it's not that weird. That's fucking weird... I wonder on what scale it becomes weird to you. Imagine we built 100s of cities on another planet and just left it empty... I do appreciate, if this is the point you want to make, that literally every newspaper, tv station, radio show, photographer etc has done a piece on Ordos. I've read the same article a million times now and it's totally uninteresting. But that's a function of overreporting, it's still inherently interesting to me.
dnautics 11y ago
I've definitely looked at some of the obviously failed, mid-construction casinos in Vegas that crop up from time to time with fascination

pavlov 11y ago

"The man led us through a courtyard, around the back of the school buildings, and suddenly there it was: the yard opened up into a wide, grassy playing field, flanked on one side by raised seating. On the edge of the grass pitch – regularly mowed, yet never used – we were pointed towards a series of bronze statues. The figures showed children in traditional Chinese dress, frozen in play as the pink silk scarves tied about their necks flapped noisily in the wind. 'Fifty thousand Quai!' the man giggled, ecstatic, before explaining to us that the silk scarves were washed and replaced on a weekly basis." Apparently thousands of buildings are being maintained, cleaned, even silk scarves on statues getting washed -- for nobody to see. Who is paying the maintenance workers' wages? The local government?

undertow 11y ago
Not to mention the draw on electricity, which probably points back to some undisclosed amount of coal being burned in a power plant, somewhere nearby...
IkmoIkmo 11y ago
Likely a consortium of the developers who have 5% occupancy rates and want to sell (look up 'rent a foreigner' for another strange way developers try to sell property) and local government yeah.

presty 11y ago

isn't all this just a matter of time? https://www.bullionstar.com/blogs/koos-jansen/guest-post-5-chinese-ghost-cities-came-alive/ https://www.bullionstar.com/blogs/koos-jansen/guest-post-5-c... http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2015/04/21/the-myth-of-chinas-ghost-cities/ http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2015/04/21/the-myth-of...

cthalupa 11y ago
This is probably the most relevant comment in the thread. These ghost cities start that way, but they all end up being populated, and as soon as the flood gates open, they fill up fast. It just takes certain factors reaching critical mass to push them from the 'No one is living there' to 'Everyone is moving in and filling the entire place up' Edit: Looks like it's already begun in Ordos as well. http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/03/06/ordos-china-tourist-city/ http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/03/06/ordos-china-to... As usual, the initial settling is largely happening due to the Chinese government applying artificial levers to get people to move there, but that's a tactic they've used successfully on a lot of these "ghost towns"
- iiiggglll 11y ago
  Sound like China is planning ahead. Contrast this with the American problem of nothing new being built: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-07/here-s-how-much-new-york-and-san-francisco-s-tight-housing-markets-are-hurting-the-economy http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-07/here-s-how...
  - adventured 11y ago
    That sounds fine, if it all works out as planned. China is about to become the most indebted nation. At the rapid pace they're accumulating debt, that should happen within the next few years. They've spent wildly to keep the building spree going; even now their real estate market is crashing, it has been falling for a year. It begs a simple question: how many more people can China transition out of old China's poverty, and into the new China's middle class, before they run out of the ability to accumulate more debt to keep it all going (global consumers are tapped out, which has left China's manufacturing boom dead in the water, with their PMI contracting during a supposed non-recessionary period). I fail to see how thinking ahead equates to taking on tens of trillions in new debt to fake economic growth. That sounds like they're baking up an economic recipe for future stagnation.

highCs 11y ago

The author is on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/darmonrichter?ty=h https://www.patreon.com/darmonrichter?ty=h

erikb 11y ago

While watching that let's not forget that at least in Europe we also have "ghost cities".

danmaz74 11y ago
I never heard of any... example?
- lmz 11y ago
  I'm not European but: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2102074/Spain-haunted-ghost-towns-built-boom-years-unemployment-tops-5million.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2102074/Spain-haunte... although things seem to be improving there: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/350b9c8c-43f4-11e4-8abd-00144feabdc0.html http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/350b9c8c-43f4-11e4-8abd-00144feabd...
  - danmaz74 11y ago
    Thanks for the link.

ChuckMcM 11y ago

There have been other stories of "ghost towns" which eventually filled up with people. Perhaps this is just one of those. I always find it fascinating but I also note that a major disaster in a city like Beijing and there is already a bunch of places to house people post disaster. I don't know if anyone else thinks about it in that way but from a civil defense perspective it seems interesting to have "back up" cities waiting. For other Person of Interest fans I found that Ordos was a ghost town interesting from that aspect of things as well.

nate_meurer 11y ago
It only makes sense if the backup cities are already owned by the government. If populating those cities post-disaster requires government appropriation of an entire city's worth of private real estate assets, the resulting financial and political instability could well dwarf anything wrought by the original disaster.
- deoptimo 11y ago
  So you think that the appropriation of unused real estate is worse than whatever disaster led to the mass exodus of a population from a major city. Interesting, but that is not how I think.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - nate_meurer 11y ago
    You have badly misread my comment.
- ChuckMcM 11y ago
  I'm not sure I understand this comment enough to agree or disagree with it. The land etc which is Ordos today was appropriated by the state and they built a city on it. It neither destabilized nor affected the operation of the current government of China in the slightest as far as I can tell. This is the same system that decided to flood several cities so that they could build a giant dam. And while their were complaints, it really didn't do the residents much good then either. So I can't imagine a scenario in China where anything the Government chose to do, especially with the reallocation by fiat, of parts of the country to a different purpose, would result in any political instability whatsoever.

jimrandomh 11y ago

It may seem weird to have almost-empty cities, but from a different perspective, a city like that is an amazing resource. If China ever has disaster or other crisis that creates lots of refugees (think Hurricane Katrina), they have a functioning city with lots of space ready for people to go to. Which is pretty awesome, when you think about it.

nate_meurer 11y ago
But these don't really make very good "backup" cities. The housing isn't owned by the government. It's owned by investors, often individuals, and it serves as a sink for money that has nowhere else to go. Real estate and construction investment of this kind is one of the big drivers of the Chinese economy. If the government confiscates property on the scale you're talking about -- even if it's in response to a disaster -- the bottom would drop out of their financial markets. Ain't gonna happen, even in a disaster.
- seanmcdirmid 11y ago
  Not to mention it's the upper middle class and rich who owns these places...the one class the government really doesn't want to piss off.
- jimrandomh 11y ago
  I think you're giving them too little credit. The government wouldn't have to confiscate property in that scenario, they could just buy it. They're not exactly short on money.

dm2 11y ago

"Typical housing prices in Kangbashi have fallen from $1,100 to $470 per square foot, over the last five years alone." Why are the prices so high? Obviously nobody wants to pay $500k - $1 million for a 1,000 sqft. apartment in a Chinese ghost town.

pavlov 11y ago
That does seem insanely expensive. Maybe the price was quoted in $/m^2 and the unit was mistakenly switched to square feet at some point? An alternative explanation is that the owners of these houses don't really want to sell them at all for some reason. Maybe keeping the money tied in unsold real estate is somehow preferable to having cash or other assets, due to e.g. government housing subsidies or something?
- seanmcdirmid 11y ago
  Nobody wants to take a loss on real estate in China, so they'll just wait until the market is better or they get compensated by the government when they eventually "redevelop" the land (those apartments only have an effective 10-20 year lifespan given quality of current construction methods). They don't take out big loans to buy these places, so there is no liquidity pressure. This is good and bad, no housing market crash but a huge zombie market of low turn over of second hand housing even in much more active first tier cities.
  - guard-of-terra 11y ago
    "those apartments only have an effective 10-20 year lifespan" Economical or political crisis hits, and they'll have to live in those apartments for 50+ years. We've been there already. How do you build an apartment block these days anyway so it just lasts 20 years? With modern materials it's a bit unexpected. It's a royally crappy idea anyway. Imagine selling one of those apartments to a person aged 40, who then promptly retires and have to live 20 years in a crumbling home or lose one and go homeless. Apartment is supposed to be a solid investment.
    - 11y ago

akandiah 11y ago

There was a great documentary done on China's empty cities done by Dateline (in Australia): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbDeS_mXMnM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbDeS_mXMnM