Posted on 02/10/2011 5:06:58 PM PST by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
Until I came across this post on redalert.wnd.com I neber even heard of the phrase "ghost cities". But in China they are all the rage! Remarkable as it seems, photographs of these "ghost cities" – after countless billions of dollars spent on their design and construction – reveal nobody lives there.
We're talking block after block of empty houses and apartment buildings, glamorous public buildings, magnificent public parks and sports complexes, even art museums, remain entirely empty.
The Mail in London estimated that China is building up to 20 new ghost cities a year on the country's "vast swathes of free land."
Business Insider speculated that the Chinese need to put their money somewhere, so developers have decided to build, as a place to store the wealth, even if the Chinese building these cities do not intend to live in them and there is no prospect they can find renters. Still, the phenomenon of China building these elaborate ghost cities is hard to understand.
"The result of this unnecessary expansion is that we have perhaps the first outposts of civilization that are impractical to the point of being unusable, as many of them have housing prices so high that even if there were people available to fill them, it would be impossible to do so," Anthony D. Poerio wrote in his entry on the website ScallyWagAndVagabond.com.
"The money simply isn't there, and ideally never will be," he said. "Otherwise the investments of an entire country's wealthy would be utterly devalued (unless China someday controls so much of the world's wealth the cost of living in these cities becomes affordable only to them." Obviously, these ghost cities are not being built in China to be inhabited. Instead, they are being built to embody capital in a physical form, as bizarre as that idea sounds.
"It might all seem mere nouveau riche folly, were it not for China's national goal of moving hundreds of millions of rural residents to big cities over the next decade, in the hope of creating a large middle class," the New York Times reported.
Still, Patrick Chovanek, business professor at Tsinghua University, insisted to the Times that the building boom is being driven by frenzied investors, not by the housing needs of millions of migrating workers. People are using real estate as an investment, as a place to store cash – they treat it like gold," Chovanec said. "They're stockpiling empty units. This is going on in cities of virtually every size."
Kind of reminds me of the building boom in the mid to late 1900's when I would see the building of strip mall aftger strip mall, and pffice building after office building being built, but with no tennants. That trend has ground to a halt with the bursting of the housing bubble. Will China reap a similar bitter harvest?
Well, at least the cemetary is a going concern...
Force the farmers who have come to the city to move to new cities where China needs people to hold onto the territory. In the Western desert where Urgyurs are, in the dry areas with mineral wealth, nothing says "ours" like 100,000 residents in a modern city. But to get the residents to stay there instead of the dense Eastern coastal cities, it needs to be as big, as gleaming and with all the infrastructure.
Build the city, then move all the wanna-be city dwellers there.
But but but wouldn’t that mean we’d have to kill them all?
where is borley rectory? not familiar with that one.
Then there is the state mental hospital in weston WV in which ghosts attack people and hunters hear bloodcurdling screams in the middle of the day and no one is there.
I still cant decide if the bricks and the 2x4s in the basement really did fly across the room and almost hit them. I know it was on video.
Replacement cities for those that are eventually nuked.
Perhaps they believe that in a nuclear exchange, their occupied cities would be annhilated, and these cities are the back-ups.
Here's some amazing satellite imagery: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1339536/Ghost-towns-China-Satellite-images-cities-lying-completely-deserted.html
Even these ghost cities have Detroit beat...
Some of these "cities" work only because they are all but empty. There is nothing like the infrastructure to needed to provide water, gas, electricity, and sewage to the citizens, even by Chinese standards, if the apartments are ever actually occupied. Its not some brilliant, long term scheme, its insanity. If the Chicom Government could stop it, without a crash that would threaten its existence, it would. But it can't, so it allows it to continue.
I wasn't commenting on how they should get where they belong.
That’s my guess too, why do we assume dictators and fanatics will not plan a nuclear exchange and have cities ready in reserve?
Except that in most circumstances one expects the old cties to be rebuilt. And you would have lost most of the useful city population, unless you relocate them just before the attack.
I heard rumor these ‘ghost cities’ are a Discovery-MythBusters experiment...they’re trying bust the History Channels- Life After People.
The Chinese thought it a fantastic venture to back, after all they know a good investment when they see it—they buy our debt. They also suspect they can resolve the North Korean nuke problem by giving Kim Jong-il a starring role.
We’ll know in 150 years if History Channel got it right, though Mythbusters is worried they may be canceled by Discovery before this myth can be cracked.
http://www.history.com/shows/life-after-people/videos#capitol-records
It is better they spend it on this than their military or terrorism support. I felt the same about the UAE and their crazy islands and sky scrappers.
or 'infidels"
Rural Chinese can be very primitive. It'll be worse than the Beverly Hillbillies.
Nope. Infidels are for menial slave work, paying the jizyah and beheading when there of no further use.
Sounds like China is following the UN’s Agenda 21 plan for community development. If people are forced to move there, then we’ll know.
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