Where is everyone?
What happened here?!
Whoooaa!!
Hi, welcome to China Uncensored.
I'm your host Chris Chappell.
Behold, the streets of China:
empty!
Huge, sprawling megacities
populated only by the promise of what might have been.
You're looking at China's meteoric GDP growth.
You see, when there's construction, GDP goes up.
But what those GDP figures don't factor in
is whether or not anyone actually ends up living in those cities.
You know the saying, "If you build it they will come?"
Well, in China, they didn't come.
These are China's ghost cities.
This is Lüliang.
Its 160 million dollar airport gets no more than five flights a day.
Most of the apartments meant for the 300,000 planned residents sit empty,
built on land that used to be irrigation ditches for the farmers.
The farmers are still around,
but the water isn't.
Then there's the city of Ordos in Inner Mongolia.
A million people were supposed to live here.
But only one in every fifty buildings is filled.
But surely there can't be that many of these ghost cities in China right?!
Well, Baidu,
basically the Chinese version of Google,
set out to find the answer.
They analyzed location data from their 700 million users.
And found more than 50 ghost cities across China.
50!
So why is this such a common phenomenon?
Part of it has to do with the government's massive push for urbanization.
According to the "National New-type Urbanization Plan”—
yes that's what it's called—
by 2020, 60 percent of the Chinese population will be living in cities.
That's more than 800 million people.
So it's not exactly an issue of
too much supply and too little demand nationwide.
It's all about location.
Real estate prices are already so high in the top-tier cities
that the average worker will never be able to own a home in their lifetime.
That's why so many people live in urban areas just outside the major cities—
for example, in recently urbanized places like this one near Beijing.
It offers lousy hospitals,
over-crowded schools,
no bus terminals,
no movie theaters,
only two tiny parks,
and 700,000 neighbors.
But living here with a three-hour commute to central Beijing
is still more appealing than living in a beautifully designed city
in Shanxi Province that has no jobs.
Remember Lüliang?
In 2010, its GDP growth was a staggering 21 percent.
Last year, it was negative 2 percent.
That's because it was coal mining town—
and coal used to be big business in China.
But with the economic slowdown,
a lot of steel makers reduced production.
They stopped buying so much coal,
and coal mines went out of business.
Then there's corruption.
Officials in China get promotions based on GDP growth.
So Lüliang officials had been boosting GDP
by building way more infrastructure than was actually needed.
Business also used to be booming in Lüliang's Liquor City area,
where they made baijiu,
a strong Chinese liquor that was very popular with officials.
But then baijiu became a target in Xi Jinping's "anti-corruption campaign"—
and now business is on the rocks.
And you know what else became a target in the "anti-corruption campaign"?
The mayor.
And a bunch of other government officials, who also got sacked.
Anyway, the city government soon ran out of money.
And that's just one city.
According to Wade Shepard, author of "Ghost Cities,"
there are 20 to 40 million empty apartments in China.
Now you'd think the central government would learn its lesson,
and put an end to all this excess building.
But it's not so simple.
Because local officials have their own plans and incentives.
According to Xinhua,
the governments of various cities across the country
have development plans that, when put together,
would provide housing for 3.4 billion people.
That's more than double China's actual population.
So unless China plans to switch to a mandatory Seven-Child Policy soon,
they're in big trouble.
So what do you think?
If you were a ghost, which Chinese ghost city would you live in?
Leave your comments below,
and subscribe and like China Uncensored on Facebook.
Once again I'm Chris Chappell. See you next time.
Xi Jinping
Zhou Yongkang
Mao. Mao. Mao.
Barack Obama
Obama
I love Chris
OFC?!
Wow, some crazy things happened in 2015.
Let's just say I don't think Xi Jinping will "let old acquaintance be forgot."