Author Topic: China's (new) Ghost Cities  (Read 3337 times)

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Online IronDioPriest

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China's (new) Ghost Cities
« on: April 26, 2011, 03:27:08 PM »
It has come to the world's attention in recent weeks and months that China has been feverishly constructing entire cities, apparently using "If we build it, they will come" as their mission statement. Problem is, nobody's coming. Entire cities are literally being carved out of the land from nothing. Infrastructure, city centers, utilities, retail space, office space, parks... But they stand empty or vastly underoccupied. Arial photographs are eery, as major traffic arteries are completely abandoned, parking lots holding a vehicle or two, and no activity aside from construction taking place. Many of these aren't small towns. They're large cities. Often the only buildings showing any occupancy at all are government office complexes.

Below is an interesting video exposing the phenomenon. It speculates that 64,000,000 apartments in these cities are unoccupied, and that occupancy rates are as low as 20-30%. It is described as a real-estate bubble that dwarfs our own.

(video @ link) China's New Ghost Cities

...and further info from dailymail.uk...

The ghost towns of China: Amazing satellite images show cities meant to be home to millions lying deserted

These amazing satellite images show sprawling cities built in remote parts of China that have been left completely abandoned, sometimes years after their construction.

Elaborate public buildings and open spaces are completely unused, with the exception of a few government vehicles near communist authority offices.

Some estimates put the number of empty homes at as many as 64 million, with up to 20 new cities being built every year in the country's vast swathes of free land.

The photographs have emerged as a Chinese government think tank warns that the country's real estate bubble is getting worse, with property prices in major cities overvalued by as much as 70 per cent.

Of the 35 major cities surveyed, property prices in eleven including Beijing and Shanghai were between 30 and 50 per cent above their market value, the China Daily said, citing the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

Prices in Fuzhou, capital of the southeastern province of Fujian, had the worst property bubble with average house prices more than 70 per cent higher than their market value, according to the survey conducted in September.

The average price in the 35 cities surveyed was nearly 30 per cent above the market value, the report said.

Property prices have remained stubbornly high despite the government adopting a slew of measures since April including hiking minimum downpayments to at least 30 per cent and ordering banks not to provide loans for third home purchases.

Prices in 70 major cities were up 0.2 per cent in October from the previous month and 8.6 percent higher than a year ago, official data showed.

The increase came after prices gained 0.5 per cent month on month in September, which was the first increase since May.

Massive stimulus measures taken since 2008 to fend off the financial crisis injected huge amounts of liquidity in the market and have been blamed for fuelling real estate prices.

'The government target is not clear and policy is incoherent,' CASS senior research Ni Pengfei was quoted saying.

According to research carried out by Time magazine, fixed-asset investment in the Asian country accounted for more than 90 per cent of its overall growth - with residential and commercial real estate investment making up nearly a quarter of that.

Regional governments across China have been building massive real estate projects, including Kangbashi in Inner Mongolia and Zhengzhou New District, which have remained empty, because of the high prices and interest in investment.

Kangbashi, which was built in just five years, was meant to be the urban centre for Ordos City - a wealthy coal-mining hub home to 1.5million people.

It was filled with office towers, administrative centres, museums, theatres and sports facilities as well as thousands of homes, but remains virtually deserted.

Prices have continued to soar, investors have increasingly turned to property speculation fuelling the continued bubble.

The onset of the 2008 global recession was the bursting of the real estate bubble in the U.S. and experts fear a similar situation in China could prove catastrophic for still struggling economies and banking systems.

Beijing has introduced measures to cool 'ridiculous' property prices, but the risks of a crash mean the campaign is unlikely to ease up in the next year.

Public discontent has been fuelled by high prices in China's cities and the measures, introduced in April, have made it more difficult for speculators and developers to hoard land and chase up prices as lending has been restricted.

Wang Shi, chairman of China Vanke - the country's largest property developer - said: 'Tightening measures will not loosen next year.

'If we can control the pace of property price gains within a reasonable range, it's already an achievement.'

Property sales for Vanke already exceeded $15billion so far this year, but Mr Shi has insisted China will not end up in a worse place than Dubai - where a property price bubble imploded during the global financial crisis.

He said: 'It could be really, really bad without the government stepping in.

'If the bubble bursts, Japan's past will be China's present.'

But short-seller Jim Chanos has issued a more dire warning, and said he expected China's economy to implode in a real estate bust.

He said the country was 'on an economic treadmill to hell' and the country's bubble was 'Dubai times 1,000'.

In the 1980s, Tokyo saw a massive rise in property prices and a subsequent crash. The Hong Kong property market experienced a similar phenomenon in the 1990s.



























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Offline LadyVirginia

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Re: China's (new) Ghost Cities
« Reply #1 on: April 26, 2011, 03:32:35 PM »
Apparently, people, no matter the country, don't like to be told where to live.
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charlesoakwood

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Re: China's (new) Ghost Cities
« Reply #2 on: April 26, 2011, 03:35:58 PM »

More central planning.  The jobs and all the good stuff are in the established cities.


Offline Libertas

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Re: China's (new) Ghost Cities
« Reply #3 on: April 26, 2011, 10:35:24 PM »
Ahhh....the communist paradise!

Plenty of elbow room and what?  No subsidized housing?  What are they doing with all their money?!

/
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Offline Glock32

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Re: China's (new) Ghost Cities
« Reply #4 on: April 26, 2011, 10:55:45 PM »

More central planning.  The jobs and all the good stuff are in the established cities.



Exactly. That's central planning for you. The proglodytes here get all aroused by the Chinese model of "state capitalism", they gush over it's ability to cut through all those annoyances like private property and individual choice so that the enlightened intelligentsia (themselves, of course) can demonstrate their genius in a glorified game of SimCity.

Get a look at those apartment blocks, geez. What a hive-mind over there. Like an ant colony or something.
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Re: China's (new) Ghost Cities
« Reply #5 on: April 26, 2011, 11:38:09 PM »
...Get a look at those apartment blocks, geez. What a hive-mind over there. Like an ant colony or something.

This impression is even more visible when witnessed in person, in a populated Chinese city. The utter absence of single family homes was one of my most immediately noticed impressions. From everything I could see, massive hives were everywhere.
"A strict observance of the written laws is doubtless one of the high duties of a good citizen, but it is not the highest. The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation. To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to written law, would be to lose the law itself, with life, liberty, property and all those who are enjoying them with us; thus absurdly sacrificing the end to the means."

- Thomas Jefferson

Offline Sectionhand

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Re: China's (new) Ghost Cities
« Reply #6 on: April 27, 2011, 07:00:46 AM »
Is this part of China's GDP ?

Online ToddF

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Re: China's (new) Ghost Cities
« Reply #7 on: April 27, 2011, 10:30:15 AM »
...Get a look at those apartment blocks, geez. What a hive-mind over there. Like an ant colony or something.

This impression is even more visible when witnessed in person, in a populated Chinese city. The utter absence of single family homes was one of my most immediately noticed impressions. From everything I could see, massive hives were everywhere.

That's everywhere over there.  Not only the most economical way to live, but there's a safety factor involved also.  No one is breaking in from the outside, when you live 20 floors up.

Offline Libertas

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Re: China's (new) Ghost Cities
« Reply #8 on: April 27, 2011, 10:33:33 AM »
It's bad enough having all of their cheap worthless (often injurious to life and limb) products flooding our nation...can't imagine living in anything they build!

 ::speechless::

 ::mooning::
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Offline Glock32

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Re: China's (new) Ghost Cities
« Reply #9 on: April 27, 2011, 11:50:09 AM »
It's bad enough having all of their cheap worthless (often injurious to life and limb) products flooding our nation...can't imagine living in anything they build!

 ::speechless::

 ::mooning::

This is one thing that makes me skeptical of these claims that China is destined to be the new economic superpower. What do they innovate there? Their principal "product" is cheap, almost slave labor. And if capital continues to flow into China, will that not have the effect of raising living standards and wages along with it?
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Offline Libertas

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Re: China's (new) Ghost Cities
« Reply #10 on: April 27, 2011, 12:02:04 PM »
It's bad enough having all of their cheap worthless (often injurious to life and limb) products flooding our nation...can't imagine living in anything they build!

 ::speechless::

 ::mooning::

This is one thing that makes me skeptical of these claims that China is destined to be the new economic superpower. What do they innovate there? Their principal "product" is cheap, almost slave labor. And if capital continues to flow into China, will that not have the effect of raising living standards and wages along with it?

Only if they stop diverting so much in into weapons...and the real ticking time bomb for them is a populace straining to enjoy a better standard of living...the Politburo only allows so much gravy to reach the people.  People in the rural areas are still living a largely peasant's day to day existence.
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Offline Glock32

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Re: China's (new) Ghost Cities
« Reply #11 on: April 27, 2011, 12:16:00 PM »
And that could be significant. We in the West largely have a view of China as a monolithic, patriotic nation fully behind its government and working as a team as they surge past we the feeble and decrepit fossils of the 19th/20th centuries. China has actively cultivated this narrative, with the assistance of their Western proglodyte admirers' fawning authority-fetish. But as you point out, China has an enormous population that yearns for a better quality of life. They may have gleaming, modern cities but, yes, what about that peasantry of the interior?
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Offline Libertas

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Re: China's (new) Ghost Cities
« Reply #12 on: April 27, 2011, 01:10:35 PM »
Yes, and even people crammed into their big cities can live a life much less comfortable than our poor have to suffer through!  They dole out enough improvement to keep them barely satisified, but dissatisfaction has to slowly build over time if rhetoric doesn't match reality.
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Online ToddF

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Re: China's (new) Ghost Cities
« Reply #13 on: April 28, 2011, 07:49:15 AM »
Ehhh.  Arguable.  I'd live in one of those cement highrises, geared to the middle class, before I'd live in the typical Amerian apartment/condo building.  To me, hell on earth is being able to hear neighbors, in our rickety construction, with creaky ceilings, thin walls, ect.  You don't hear neighbors when your ceiling is cement.

They are not American highrises.  Then again, they aren't the quality of people that tend to populate American highrises either, so no urine smells in the elevators.  No grafitti in the common areas.  The stuff on the roofs (little park like areas actually) aren't stolen as fast as they're put out.  ::hysterical::

It's not just China, but most of Asia where there's an extreme difference in living standards between the country and the cities.  Meanwhile, Asia is tending to be moving in the right directions.  Even the traditional basket cases of countries such as Vietnam.  As for China, peole who's grandparent might have escaped Mao, are actually starting to go back, because opportunities in China are better than the country they emmigrated to.

Asia is moving in the right direction, some quicker than others, but pretty much all moving that way.  Can anyone say that about America, anymore?


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Re: China's (new) Ghost Cities
« Reply #14 on: April 01, 2015, 07:57:18 AM »
I guess ghost cities...need ghost bridges...







http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-03-31/china-builds-6-million-bridge-nowhere

Hey...kinda almost looks like the place where they built those ark ships in that hilarious comedy "2012"!
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