They resemble scenes from an apocalyptic movie: multiple high-rise buildings wobbling precariously before crashing to the ground, engulfed in clouds of dust. Others just seem to fall apart, collapsing like ugly monsters retreating underground.
The footage has gone viral in recent months, traced by online sleuths to locations across China. Chinese media say they show “illegal buildings” being “forcibly demolished according to law.”
As China’s massive property bubble began to burst, the videos fueled speculation that the Communist Party is using an ax in its forest of ghost towns: the sprawling, empty metropolises that sprang up across the country, monuments to economic madness.
China has an estimated 30 million unsold or unfinished homes. That’s on top of an estimated 65 million homes – roughly equivalent to one home for every person in the UK – that have been sold as investments but are still vacant. Dozens of cities, with all the trappings of city life except people.
The famous London landmark, the Tower Bridge, has been recreated in the Chinese city of Suzhou
This building frenzy was fueled by speculation, enabled by a great wall of debt and built on the expectation of ever-rising prices. In short, one giant Ponzi scheme. But one that, remarkably, President Xi Jinping wants to revive to save a struggling Chinese economy.
During my time as a foreign correspondent in China, I had a morbid fascination with these surreal places. Some cities consisted of endless rows of ugly towers. Others were vast fields of villas. They were all empty.
There was Kangbashi, an extension of the city of Ordos in Inner Mongolia. It was built for a million people at a cost of $500bn (£410bn), complete with museum, large library and theatre, all set around a deserted central square. There was a nine-story hospital that only treated one person a day during my visit.
But at least the buses ran on time, through largely deserted streets, and were undeterred by the almost complete absence of passengers.
I met a student who traded an empty campus during the day for a night job in an empty restaurant. “I can’t wait to get out,” he told me. At night, hardly any light shone from the windows of the monstrous high-rise. “It’s too quiet,” a lone policeman told me. But at least there was no crime.
Then there was Yujiapu, a new district of the port city of Tianjin, 650 kilometers east of Ordos. Built as a copy of Manhattan, it was heralded as the world’s largest financial center in the making. During my visit, construction had largely ground to a halt and stray dogs roamed the dusty streets in the shadow of the empty, half-finished shells of towering buildings, including a replica of Rockefeller Center.
The photo shows a replica of Paris in Tianducheng, Zhejiang Province. The replica town looks like a ghost town
An urban environment in Thames Town that mimics London in Songjiang District, Shanghai
A tower in Tianjin, 117, would become the sixth-tallest skyscraper in the world, part of another new business district that includes multiple residential and commercial towers, French and Italian-style mansions, a wine museum, sprawling gardens and even a polo club. Construction on the 128-story “ghost scraper” began in 2008, but it’s now an abandoned, rusting eyesore, never completed or inhabited.
More than 1,000 miles to the south, Dongguan had the world’s largest shopping mall—only in its cavernous halls, layer after layer of winding marble-lined walkways next to the shells of hundreds of shops, not a single customer could be seen.
China has also pioneered a bizarre brand of copycat architecture – and it’s here that the ghosts are most surreal.
About 20 miles southwest of Shanghai is Thames Town, built like a replica of a British market town, right down to its cobbled streets, Victorian-style terraces, a mock Tudor pub, red telephone boxes and a fish and chip shop.
This town, too, was largely deserted during my visit – except for couples posing for wedding photos, with whom it is popular. They like to be photographed next to Thames Town statues, including Winston Churchill, James Bond (with only a passing resemblance to Roger Moore) and Harry Potter on a broomstick.
Half-timbered Tudor-style houses on the River Thames in Shanghai
On the outskirts of nearby Hangzhou, farmers were evicted to make way for a Chinese version of Paris, featuring a scale replica of the Eiffel Tower. Elsewhere, China has built copies of Amsterdam, Venice and Madrid.
A 90 minute drive to the hills north of Beijing brings you to a clone of ‘Jackson Hole’. The American ski resort in Wyoming is known for its natural beauty, but when I visited the Chinese version was shrouded in smog so thick you could taste it.
Security guards dressed in cowboy outfits followed me as I explored the empty “rustic” lodges. “It’s busy on weekends,” one of them assured me.
The search for ghost towns and cities has become something of a cult, with websites dedicated to it. The American author Bianca Bosker has written an entire book about China’s copycat architecture. China appears to be reversing the ‘Middle Kingdom’ paradigm. Once considered the center of the world, China is now establishing itself as the center that actually encompasses the world,” she writes in Original Copies: Architectural Mimicry In Contemporary China.
Most of the houses in China’s original ghost towns have been sold, not to live in, but as an investment. They are not rented out because that lowers the value in China. So they are left in the hope that their value will increase. There have historically been few other decent investment opportunities in China – bank deposits pay next to nothing, and the stock market is like a casino.
Real estate developers built up a mountain of debt by pouring staggering amounts of concrete to meet what seemed like boundless demand.
Creepy: A red telephone box outside a church with a traditional English spire in Shanghai’s Thames Town
For three crazy years between 2010 and 2013, China consumed more concrete than the United States in the entire 20th century, according to one estimate. China saw one of the largest and most sustained increases in real estate prices ever.
According to a recent report in the Chinese business magazine Caixin, China now has nearly 600 million buildings. But it’s not clear how this number — which represents nearly one building for every two Chinese — is split between commercial and residential real estate.
According to Guo Shuqing, chairman of the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission, China’s banks fueled this frenzy by throwing money at developers and buyers with abandon, to the point that by the end of 2020, real estate-related loans accounted for 39 percent of bank loans. At the time, he described the real estate market as a “gray rhinoceros” – a very obvious threat that is ignored until it attacks.
The real estate firms bought the land from heavily indebted local governments, for whom it became an essential source of income. They, in turn, got it from local farmers, who were often driven off their land with little compensation.
The ghost towns spread across the country like a virus. The model required buildings to be built and sold at an ever-increasing pace and price. Then, a little over a year ago, the music stopped.
Alarmed that things were spiraling out of control, the government tightened lending rules in an effort to contain that great wall of debt.
A giant developer called Evergrande was the first victim, unable to pay debts estimated at $300bn (£250bn), making it the world’s most indebted company. It had more than 1,300 developments spread across 280 cities in China.
Chinese newlyweds walk past a statue of Winston Churchill during their wedding photos near Thames Town Church
Riot police were deployed outside the company’s headquarters in Shenzhen, where angry protesters gathered. “Evergrande, give back my money I earned with blood and sweat!” shouted someone who managed to break into the lobby.
But President Xi, who spent two years trying to slowly deflate the real estate bubble, now sees its inflation as a short-term solution to the struggling economy.
Real estate companies are rescued, their excavators and cranes are released again. “It’s absolute madness,” says Gillem Tulloch, who coined the term “ghost town” more than a decade ago. Tulloch, who heads GMT Research, an accounting research firm based in Hong Kong, says it’s no surprise that China is returning to real estate for a quick economic hit. ‘They don’t know anything else. This is the model they’ve been using for two decades to drive growth.”
Beijing claims that some of their older abandoned metropolises are now filling up.
But the ghosts of China, it seems, are far from being banished.
- Ian Williams is the author of The Fire Of The Dragon: China’s New Cold War (Birlinn).