Ghost Cities of China: The Story of Cities without People in the World's Most Populated Country

by Wade Shepard, Paul French (Series Editor)

Featuring everything from sports stadiums to shopping malls, hundreds of new cities in China stand empty, with hundreds more set to be built by 2030. Between now and then, the country's urban population will leap to over one billion, as the central government kicks its urbanization initiative into overdrive. In the process, traditional social structures are being torn apart, and a rootless, semi-displaced, consumption orientated culture rapidly taking their place. Ghost Cities of China is an enthralling dialogue driven, on-location search for an understanding of China's new cities and the reasons why many currently stand empty.

Genres: China, Nonfiction, Architecture, Cities, Sociology, Urban Studies, Asia

232 pages, Paperback

First published March 15, 2015

Reviews

[Mary Soderstrom · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent book by a man who has been roaming the world for several years, reporting back on trends and places that North Americans know too little about. Should be found in every public library and in the private library of everyone interested in the future of the world and cities...

[Behr Boswell · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nothing too special here, as it reads like a very very long article, with sprinkles of personal reflection. Often the numbers stack up and you realize you are sortie reading the same thing over and over again. Repetition can be nice, but this just spoke over itself to get that 200 page landmark in the bag. Still, incredibly informative and also terrifying. China still proceeds to do this to its neighborhoods and economy even when it’s clearly destroying its people. Like they give a damn...

Read for a project for my Chinese History Class.

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderful bit of on-the-ground reportage about the story of China's rapid urbanisation between roughly the years of 2000-2014. It turns out that the ubiquity of ghost towns in China has been overreported and perhaps wilfully misreported by Western media. Ghost towns certainly exist, but these are the exceptions: most so-called ghost towns are not failed developments but rather developments that simply haven't been around long enough to be fully populated yet. The real story of Chinese ghost towns isn't that they exist, but that the vast majority of them are in fact inhabited a few years after they're completed.

Some of the confusion around Chinese ghost towns exists due to a fundamental difference between contemporary Chinese programmes of urban development and the programmes of virtually the whole rest of the world. China has two things that ensure that the majority of ghost towns eventually fill up with humans: its massive population of more than 1.4 billion people, and the total control of the Chinese Communist Party over virtually all aspects of society and culture. In the West, development follows people: our populations are relatively small and rich and our cities are already mostly settled, so it doesn't make financial sense to build massive new developments in the middle of nowhere. But China is different. Its population is enormous, there's a lot of working poor who'll readily relocate for work, and there's a massive amount of rural people who are moving (and who are often forced by the CCP) out of their villages and into urban spaces. The massive amount of people who're moving into China's cities means that any new urban developments will eventually fill up with people of their own accord. It's as simple as there being just fucking heaps of people.

But on top of that, the CCP ensures the success of these new urban developments by forcing the relocation not only of people but of businesses into these urban centres. The iron fist of the CCP doesn't wait patiently for the natural migration of money and people into these spaces; it literally picks up and plonks down by virtue of government decree entire businesses, business sectors, and government agencies into these skeleton cities. The CCP wields massive power, and it uses it to force life into these proto cities the moment it wants to, instead of letting nature take its course.

This is why most Chinese ghost cities aren't really ghost cities. They're not abandoned failures. Most Chinese ghost cities are places in transition, which for one reason or another just haven't reached the habitation phase of their lifecycle just yet. But the iron laws of demographics, population growth, internal migration, and government intervention mean that eventually, assuredly, almost every single one of them will.

Overall, a fascinating view of a rapidly urbanising China. It's full of disgusting scandals on an unimaginable scale. The scale of the environmental destruction wrought by this urbanisation movement, of land and housing speculation, of the destruction of built and cultural heritage, of the degree to which questions of money have overridden, it seems, all other humane and ethical concerns--the mind just boggles. This book makes the modern Chinese person seem extremely appetitive and status-hungry. The accelerationists would froth this place. But I know that's not the full story. The story of modern China is the story of the forces of world history working at the speed of digital money and modern hi-tech. Modern China is both a microcosm of the rest of the world, with its globalisation, urbanisation, financialisation, and hypercompetitive capitalism, and also increasingly the centre of gravity of the world itself. It's quite a story.

[Ian McHugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an excellent book on modern China. Shepard builds on the excellent material frequently posted on his blog - http://vagabondjourney.com - to bring together a refreshing (if a little sympathetic) perspective on the growth of Chinese cities in the first two decades of the 21st Century.

The idea that there is no such thing as a 'ghost city' is a compelling one and it will be interesting to see how the cities identified in the book develop in the coming years. Coverage of the environmental impact is covered well but does not get to the root of some of the terrible impacts that have resulted due to the urbanisation project - in Shepard's defence there is lots of material available elsewhere where such thorough examination is available. The discussion of the housing market is excellent a puts pay to many simplistic arguments put forward in the western media about a property bubble in China. The flaw in argumentation is that, in light of the stock market fluctuation at the beginning of 2016, confidence onfidence has been shaken - particularly by what Bill Bishop calls the 'circuit breaker mechanism' of the stock exchange. This will mean there may be "a shortage of suckers for stocks"(Sinocism blog 07/01/2016) and so the property price identified by Shepard as having reaching "the top of the bell curve" may well have some way to go yet.
I would've liked a more thorough referencing scheme in earlier chapters, and any subsequent editions will need to include Xi Jinping's plans for the "mega region" cities, but this book comes highly recommended for anyone wishing to get to the underlying root of the Chinese housing market and urbanisation and its ascent to the top of the world economy.

[Wendy · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm not sure I understand why China is doing what they are doing. It sound to me like they are bulldozing people's homes to build new (poor quality) buildings in their place. People own their homes, but not the land they are on, so they have no recourse if the government decides they want something else on that land. The are new poor quality buildings, sometimes whole cities, that have never been inhabited. Nothing is expected to last more than a few decades before it gets bulldozed for something new. It is a waste of resources on a colossal scale.

I would've given it 3 stars if there had been photos, but maybe that wasn't possible.

[Gordon · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very readable profile on the Chinese real estate market, which provides unique insight on the legal and cultural structures that contribute to that market's strange conditions. However, I must fault the author with providing economic analysis that fails to uphold basic economic principles. The author falls into the common trap of people who study China.

Many choose their study of China because of their love and admiration for the country. This leads to an overwhelming compulsion to proclaim everything China does as a success. This is shortsighted, but not unique to this book.

[Jacob El · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this on a 22 hour train across the country. Was a good background overview to the unfathomable construction boom apparent out the window. An important book.

[Tom Auclair · Rating 2 out of 5]

Fascinating subject, but this book has absolutely no human feel to it. It just reads like a government report. Very disappointing.

[The Shanghaipreneur · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ever since I moved to China in 2011, I have wanted to read a book like Wade Shepard’s Ghost Cities of China: The Story of Cities Without People in the World’s Most Populated Country, published by Zed Books in 2015. Since living these past six years in Beijing and Shanghai, I have developed the habit of going on long, meandering walks through unfamiliar parts of the city. During these excursions, I quickly noticed that the older, decaying communities near where I lived, the very enclaves that gave my adopted hometowns their unique character, often transformed into piles of rubble without notice.

I was left to wonder… Where did that noodle shop go?

What happened to that great jianbing guy?

How about those kids that were playing in the street just last week?

Sometimes in the week after the destruction of an urban village, masons would build a wall around the newly freed land. Sometimes the lot just lied in ruin for months. And sometimes construction workers and equipment swooped in and began the process of transmogrification into vertical gray-black office spires. White collar workers then spent their day there, perhaps grabbing a coffee at lunch in the overpriced cafe on the first floor, and vacated the premises at the end of the business day in favor of apartments in newly built skyscraper boxes over an hour away in the suburbs. A neighborhood that once teemed with activity at all times of the day and night was left eerily empty in the dark.

What is the logic behind this process?

I knew that Chinese real estate was ridiculously expensive, but never quite grasped all of the complex machinations that facilitated its development from communal property into a quasi-private form of individual financial asset for the laobaixing. Thankfully, Wade Shepard provides a thorough primer on the subject. Because approximately one-fifth of China’s GDP is related to the real estate industry, anyone interested in the contemporary Chinese economy should read this thoroughly entertaining and highly informative book.

Wade Shepard is an experienced freelance journalist. His crisp and clean writing style reflects years on the beat for Forbes, South China Morning Post, and countless other reputable sources. The book is based on two-plus years of research, travel, and interviews with experts and people on the ground. His clear, no-nonsense approach is a welcome reprieve for this professor, who probably reads too many academic articles and dissertations converted for publication.

Ghost Cities comes in at just over 200 pages and is comprised of ten mostly narrative-based chapters. The first and last chapters serve as introduction and conclusion without being termed as such. Chapters 2 through 9 address the variety of topics needed to understand the unprecedented and uniquely Chinese phenomenon of large-scale urbanization. “Clearing the Land” (Chapter 2) describes the nature and necessity of local government land sales to private developers. Some cities are so desperate for the cash and recognition that accompany GDP growth that they have literally moved mountains in order to create higher-value marketable land. “Powering the New China” (Chapter 8) explains the monumental task of providing electricity to one billion urban dwellers. Though China is poised to become a leader in alternative energy for decades to come, it has an insatiable demand that dictates a long-term reliance on dirty coal power as well. By 2030, the country will have installed over 2,500 gigawatts of annual electricity supply production - an installed base that is approximately two-and-a-half times that of the United States.

Other chapters describe in detail the nature of the “ghost city” appellation so eagerly employed by Western media outlets like 60 Minutes, Business Insider, and Time. In fact, Shepard successfully argues that the term “ghost city” itself is a misnomer. With connotations inherited from America’s old Wild West, it implies the depopulation of a formerly thriving center of commerce. When you say “ghost city” in America, thoughts turn to old mining towns, abandoned Catskills mountaintop resorts, and strip hotels along Route 66. But the character of “ghost cities” in China is exactly the opposite.

In this sense, the Western media offers a criticism that is woefully misplaced. Zhengdong New District in Zhengzhou, Nanhui in Shanghai, Tianjin’s Ecocity, and even infamous deserted desert district Ordos Kangbashi have all seen millions of people inhabit these areas after their embarrassing "ghost city" exposure. If you pause to think about it for just a second, that is the way it should work. These cities are built in anticipation of a flood of new residents. They are not going to reach capacity in a year. They probably will not even reach capacity in a decade. In a country where only one-fifth of its 1.4 billion people lived in cities at the beginning of Deng Xiaoping’s grand hybrid capitalist experiment and which has literally only just reached the halfway point in its goal of having one billion urban citizens by 2050, how else is this process going to work? This Field of Dreams “build it and they will come” philosophy is absolutely necessary.

The Party perceives Chinese urbanization as a priority for a variety of reasons. The primary reason is quite simple. Urban dwellers consume more. Thus, they contribute significantly more to GDP in the long run than self-sufficient farmers. In the short run, permanent construction offers a temporary super boost to GDP. Shepard lists a variety of other reasons as well. Another reason perhaps is to limit the chance of rural revolt by reversing the Mao maxim “the countryside surrounds the city.” In future China, it is clear that “the city surrounds the countryside” (90). Thus, for ambitious Party leaders, rapid urban development is a good way to earn a promotion.

This immutable aspect of human nature - the desire to succeed in one's individual career - explains a lot about the nature of China’s local debt problem. Indeed, various sources cite Chinese net debt as approaching $30 trillion. The success of temporary city leaders increasingly relies on the undertaking of grandiose projects like the creation of endless central business districts, shopping malls, and Western-style suburbs. These projects require extensive financing, forcing cities to become ever more dependent on land sales for income to service these massive debts.

But Shepard points out what should be obvious to Western China doomsayers like Gordon Chang, who wrote The Coming Collapse of China... in 2001! Party-operated locales mostly owe debt to Party-operated financial institutions. These same banks and funds have consistently shown a willingness to restructure this debt to accommodate the successful realization of government goals. And it’s not like these new infrastructure investments are all sunk cost leviathans. They do earn money. Eventually. For example, the current Prime Minister Li Keqiang initiated a $25.8 billion investment in Zhengzhou’s Zhengdong New District in 2003 (48). However, in a scant ten years later, its economy was growing at a healthy clip - around 13% - and already returning $1.22 billion in annual tax revenues to Beijing (55). For economists like myself who prefer to take the long-term view, that’s a pretty healthy return on investment! Aside from Shenzhen and Shanghai’s Pudong District, the classic examples of Chinese development success, this book provides many examples of flourishing urban planning.

The only aspect of this book that I found fault with was the author’s claim that the Chinese “housing market is readjusting and topping out” (204). In 2016, Chinese real estate prices increased an average of 19% nationwide. But this criticism does not disprove the main thesis of Ghost Cities.

With just a little patience, most but probably not all of China’s “ghost cities” will likely be accretive to GDP and contribute to the “grand strategy” of Chinese leadership. Sadly, the West often lacks these qualities - the ability to think in decades instead of quarters, the ability to execute and complete large-scale projects - when it comes to finance and economics.

A little “boots on the ground” perspective goes a long way.

Note: To see this review with pictures, go here.

[Keen Reader · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is part of the Asian Arguments series, this particular title focuses on the so called “Ghost Cities” of China, which the author explains is really a bit of a misnomer. Shepard has done his homework and rolls out the dizzying list of facts and stats. When the Communists took control in 1949, China had 69 cities and today it has 658. Nearly 600 new cities have already been established across China in roughly sixty five years. Over the next twenty years China will build hundreds more. By 2020 no less than forty Chinese cities are expected to have subway systems. China has lost 28’000 rivers since 1990. Hebei province once had 1,052 lakes and now has 83.

We learn about the many ways in which they do many things differently to the west, like the case of Lanzhou, in the western Gansu province, where they literally attempted to move mountains in order to expand the city to the size they wanted. China Medical City, it’s exactly what you think it is. Or the site of Hallstatt in Austria, which was painstakingly replicated and recreated in rural China in all its detail. Or the mysterious village of Huaxi, which claims to be the richest in the world and has replicas of the Great Wall, Arc de Triomphe, the White House and the Sydney Opera House. A local author describes the place as “a quasi-slavery system. No weekends. No vacations. No privacy.”

We learn about The New South China Mall in Dongguan, Alex Hu a man who made his vast fortunate from instant noodles decided to build the world’s biggest shopping mall, with sections created to look like Amsterdam, Paris, Rome, Venice, Egypt, the Caribbean and California, including 2.1 km canal transportation network and yet this massive project failed because it’s location was set amidst filthy factories and the city was too far away from all the major cities. This form of so called “duplitecture” creating or recreating classic and established architectural treasures, towns or cities, trying to send out the message to their own people and the rest of the world that they can do what the west can do except a lot quicker, which is obviously ridiculous and is the classic mistake of the nouveau riche the world over, particularly in the petro-gulf states. You can’t just throw money at something in the belief that it can translate into substance, culture or history. It just comes across as crass, desperate and a bit silly

It was interesting to read how differently the Chinese financial system works to most of the other major economies in the world and how they have learned to become largely self-reliant and not overly dependent on the economies of those in the west, especially after the credit crunch. Shepard covers many aspects of these largely empty cities, and more often than not the feeling you get is of a futuristic vision, of chilling dystopic settings of heavily populated and heavily polluted cities crammed with hundreds of identical, grey towers housing tens of millions. This may not be exactly true, but it’s not too far away from the truth either.

[Malcolm Little · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ghost Cities of China is quality discourse on [primarily] the economic and bureaucratic underpinnings that propel the recent urbanization phenomenon sweeping across China like wildfire. The author maintains a strong focus on what has been mis-characterized about ghost cities, while bringing in some pertinent anecdotes and qualitative research to back up the quantitative measures he’s uncovered.

At times, though, I found the narrative repetitive, offering one too many examples. The examples surely highlight how systematic the urbanization trend is across the country, yet the author could have spent more of his wordspace delving into the consequences the sameness brought on by “China as Sim City” has and will continue to wrought. So much of what is said could have been summed up in much fewer words: China has a heavily internalized and centrally controlled economy; Chinese citizens have been trained to place the wealth of their labors into property; Chinese municipalities achieve funds primarily through land development.

Those aforementioned facts are reinforced throughout Ghost Cities in China. Not only that, the author loves to marvel at the audacity of the geographic, economic, and temporal scales involved. He denigrates foreign media (rightfully so) for being naïve and provincial in their thinking. Even so, whereas the media are certainly influential, the author chose to attack their flimsy arguments instead of chasing the meatier aspects behind the ghost cities.

Those aspects were grazed lightly, such as when the author interviews a local Chinese struggling amidst the newfangled cities. Whenever the local castigates being treated like a disposable peon, or denigrates the built environments lack of authenticity, or rages at the rat race their government is putting them through, the author only lightly touches on the backstory. Certainly, there is information on forced evictions, architectural blunders, and the erasure of thousands of years of Chinese culture & history. Yet, as with the Communist government who has deemed those factors irrelevant, the author passes them by as though they are footnotes on the march towards economic supremacy. The natural environment gets the same glancing blow.

Ultimately, bias seeps through this book. It is an understandable bias, one commonly seen when in awe of previously unseen scales in full bloom. The author could have utilized a more critical eye in looking at the consequences of the enormous urbanization endeavor unfolding in China, and by doing so, he may have asked the question seriously lacking in the narrative: they can, but should they?

[Floris Meertens]

Het absurde fenomeen van de oprijzende spooksteden past goed in de verhalen over China. Het idee dat er gigantische complexen zijn die volledig leeg staan in een land waarin op een gegeven moment een miljoen mensen per week van het platteland naar de stad verhuisden, klinkt spannend en paradoxaal. Het narratief geeft China een zweem van uniek exotisme, dat het zo vaak heeft.

Wade Shepard heeft een simpel antwoord op de vraag waarom deze steden leeg zijn: ze worden nog wel gevuld. Het is de filosofie van een planeconomie: als staat creëren wij het aanbod, en later komt wel de vraag. De mislukte spooksteden van tien jaar terug zijn nu vaak succesvolle projecten met honderdduizenden mensen. De Westerse media heeft vaak niet het geduld om te wachten op resultaat, omdat de onderliggende ideeën over wonen zo anders zijn.

Toch schuwt Shepard niet enkele bizarre eigenschappen te laten zien van hedendaagse Chinese bouwprojecten. Of het nu gaat om een 1:1 replica van het Oostenrijkse dorpje Hallstatt, een nieuwe stad volledig gewijd aan de biomedische wetenschap (CMC), of een Middeleeuws stadscentrum dat vernietigd wordt om een exacte kopie ervan te bouwen (Taizhou), hij legt helder uit hoe het komt dat zulke projecten gefinancierd en gerealiseerd worden.

Het meest fascinerend vond ik nog wel Huaxi, het plattelandsdorp met het hoogste gebouw in China, waarbij miljonairs zichzelf tot slaaf maken om het dorp zo rijk mogelijk te maken. Werkelijk dystopisch.

[V · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite interesting and comprehensive read, although repetitive at times.

The conclusion somehow reminds me of the song 梯田 by my favourite (Taiwanese) artist.

Why can’t I see the terraced fields?
There are a lot more hotels
Living and watching Western films inside
The water buffaloes have merely become pictures
Hanging on the walls
A symbol of the rich getting ever richer
Groups of foreigners want to look outside the windows at the scenery
But they can only see hotels with more storys than yours

Is humanity in a tight corner?
Wrecking the natural wildlife
Is that hard work?

Can we only use video recordings?
To give the next generation, the next generation a wake up call?
Pitiful, lamentable the green forest has already been made into a documentary
That smell of green is gone You can only enjoy the heavy pollution

Oh, my dear cows
Oh, where have you run off to?
(translated by draagon)

[Drew · Rating 4 out of 5]

An admirable attempt to contextualize and explain what looks (and was reported as) utterly mad from a Western perspective. Lucky to have read this now in the midst of an economic war that is putting the screws to China's model of urbanization that, even with the arguments laid out in this book, seems fundamentally unsustainable.
While I understand the point of the book was to explain the Chinese model from a Chinese perspective, I would have been helped immensely by some consultation with Western economists to debate or analyze how this could work. As written, it's perhaps a bit too easy to distinguish what is ambition and what is delirium.

[Reka Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

Would have given full pints, nicely written but disappointingly not a single photograph in it even though the topic would have been more than just inviting to show the cities and areas being discussed. So one can only google pictures but that doesn't really give credit to the fascinating places the author describes.

[Coco Liu · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved reading about a topic that’s not often brought up. It’s like looking into a different world I know little about yet it’s scaling rapidly.

I liked how the author posted a question in the beginning, and addressed it positively in the end.

[Charles Satchwell · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was written when China was booming but we are now seeing the aftermath from what they outline in it. The CCP does nothing that is not rooted in self interest and to the detriment of the people they claim to "love" and support

[Gemma · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting insight into the different settlement hierarchy of China and the shifting urbanisation movement in the country. Nice inclusion of locals' stories and anecdotes. I like the use of various statistics and figures from published sources; will definitely be trying to use some of these to create in depth case studies for my IB students.
Repetitive In places. Lip service given to the idea of the sustainability of this urbanification...maybe this is another book in the making? Definitely an interesting time to see all of this change unfold...what will be the social ramifications?

[Mizuki]

I found out this book by watching this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZdBe...

If you are a ghost then which Chinese ghost cities would you want to be living?

Good question.

[Looi Yuen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Talking about the "ghost cities" that are depicted by the Western media, but the truth is so much more complicated. My conclusion: China's new cities are real life games of Sim City that the governments start with unlimited money.

[Daniel Burton-Rose · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sensitive investigation of pressing issue that takes China on its own terms.