The ghost cities were built as a real estate scam.
It worked like this:
Mr Chan built the place for 1 million RMB and as it was building sold it to his brother-in-law Mr Wu for 1.20 million RMB who sold it to Mr Chan’s Wife Mrs Zhu (Chinese women don’t take their husbands name)for 1.5 million who sold the place to her uncle Mr Chin for 1.75 million who sold the development to Mr Chan again for 2 million. Mr Chan then sells the development to Mr Smith from the US/Australia/UK for 2.5 million RMB after pitching to him the fraudulent idea that the property had doubled in value in just one year
The issue is that the Chinese con-men/Real Estate developers didn’t stop to think that Mr Smith would only be fooled by this ONCE. He told his friends so that when Mr Chan started phase II of the development he is left holding the bag on a lot of unfinished, over price property
Why don’t we ship all our illegals over there so they can live in those ghost cities ?
That’s what I was thinking until yesterday, and still wouldn’t be surprised if “scam” were a nontrivial part.
Thing is, China is a survivor. Psychological survivors (not necessarily to be confused with “preppers”) are prone to doing some pretty strange things, but ultimately it serves their perpetuation. China has been “surviving” as an advanced culture for thousands of years, and learned to do some pretty strange things to ensure that come “interesting times” they’ll get thru it mostly intact. In this case, the hoarding of the single most enduring representation of wealth (gold) and the building of strange urban concrete jungles (ghost cities) ensures that when everything crashes, the two things absolutely critical to national/cultural survival will endure: money and real estate (I’m assuming they’ve got agriculture figured out too).
This in contrast to Western civilization, which is currently built on debt and low-endurance housing.