[TexGrill]

Global business tip

[tet68]

Liberals will love it...it’s close to shopping and
you can take the bus anywhere.

[jmacusa]

Not trying to sound bigoted or racist here but how in The Wide World of Sports did there ever come to be so many Chinese?

[Husker24]

My God, a city with almost the population of the U.S.

[smaug6]

Met coal in the dumpster. Might be a buy signal if this clears.

[E. Pluribus Unum]

The Commies of Collyfornya have their high-speed rail to nowhere, and the Commies of Beijing have their high-rise containment facilities for everyone.

[Cementjungle]

How about a Chinese city of 260 million people?

That's one huge city. Dominoes Pizza will have to rethink its "free delivery anywhere in the city" offer there.

[Chode]

if there was ever an actual single combined city capable of holding 260M people, flooding would be massive since there would prolly never be a drainage system capable of moving that amount of water during heavy rain

[Dogbert41]

Talk about a ghetto!

[Vince Ferrer]

It appears nobody in Beijing has quite worked out the social consequences of forced migration. Apparently, the premise of the urbanization push is that the state will be able to control rural migrants in the new cities. People will be concentrated in small areas where block committees and Communist Party members can keep tabs on the arrivals from rural areas. “Thus the sea in which fish can swim becomes much smaller and more controllable,” writes Eric Kalkhurst, a China trade consultant.

I am becoming a fan of John Calhoun, a 20th century scientist who dealt with the effects of population density. He performed some experiments on rats where he build rat cities where all of their needs, except infinite living space, were taken care of. These rat utopias all had the same end, population growth until a point when the behavior of rat society fell apart, followed by a complete and permanent collapse of the rat city.

His experiments became very famous, and were debated endlessly as to whether they applied to humans. Then he sort of fell out of fashion. But if he is correct, these Chinese cities, no matter how successful they are, or even because of their success, will be the cause of the collapse of China.

[Southack]

I was in Beijing last week. Then I drove a couple hours North and a couple hours East after that.

Here’s what I want to know: Where were all of the people? Out of some 30 subway stops in their two main inner loops, maybe 3 stops were packed with people, but even then it wasn’t Tokyo-levels of commuters.

Beijing has highway traffic too, but not traffic jams from overcrowding.

...and there were a few farmers in fields, but just a handful.

I walked the Great Wall for miles without seeing a single other human from horizon to horizon, and the Great Wall is built along ridgelines and over mountaintops so your view is fantastic.

I’m not saying that China was empty. I did see people and even had to wait in a few lines...but I’m wondering where the other 1.3 Billion people went.