How many ghost cities in china

However, the state-owned company refuted that number to another Chinese media outlet just days later. Ghost Cities of China author Wade Shepard — who has been documenting the existence of ghost cities since he first stumbled across a sprawling vacant metropolis in — sees these cities as simply in a phase between construction and inhabitability. Mr Shepard said the same kind of construction phase had been seen throughout global history when developed nations first expanded, just not on the same excessive scale as in China.

He hails China's new big city movement as a great success that gives backwater cities the potential to develop and expand. Unlike many cities across the globe where populations constantly outgrow the infrastructure , leaving city planners to find new ways of dealing with traffic jams and demand for more construction space, China is usually one step ahead.

As one Chinese city mayor said, it was like buying a suit a few sizes too big for a growing boy. Consultancy firm J Capital Research has made it its mission to document every ghost city in China, opening a website to show just how much empty property there is across the country.

Managing partner Tim Murray said many of China's most prosperous cities had been created in this way, including Shenzen, which borders Hong Kong and is now China's fourth largest city. Another example is the Pudong new area of Shanghai which was once a "swamp" across the river from the main city. Mr McMahon said whether a ghost city became inhabited or not depended on its ability to create jobs and industrial growth. In the case of Zhengdong in Zhengzhou, capital of Central China's Henan Province, Mr McMahon said the Government "threw tens of millions of dollars in incentives" to Foxconn, the Taiwanese maker of Apple's iPhones, so the company agreed to open a factory in the town.

That factory employed , people and it "jump-started the ghost city overnight," Mr McMahon, a former journalist for the Wall Street Journal in China, said. In Jing Jin New City, a luxury resort town kilometres from Beijing, a high-speed railway line provides hope for a similar "jump-start".

There are currently only a few small shops, so most home owners only visit during the holidays or on weekends, Ms Fan, who works for Jing Jin New City Real Estate, said. The rail line to Beijing is set to open next year, but new regulations have now restricted the purchase of villas and apartments in Jing Jin New City to local residents, shutting out residents of Beijing who Ms Fan said made up per cent of buyers.

While other ghost cities might be largely empty, the apartments were mostly sold, Mr McMahon said. Many people buy the property for investment with no intention of ever moving in, so supply significantly outweighed demand. Mr McMahon said he believed ghost cities were a "symptom of the problem" of how the Chinese economy worked, where growth was driven by debt. The officials in Beijing know it and have been trying very aggressively to both wean the economy off debt and try and come up with a new driver of growth.

Officials in Beijing talk a lot about needing to move up the value chain into more technologically advanced industries, and that innovation is the way of the future for the Chinese economy. We acknowledge Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the First Australians and Traditional Custodians of the lands where we live, learn, and work.

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Foreign property investment plummets as tougher regulations bite. More on:. Top Stories Family stranded in Simpson Desert after campervan bogged on flooded roads. A former cop calls it 'the number one threat to society'. Their existence has been well-documented.

In one prominent example, CBS' " 60 Minutes " ran a segment on China's ghost towns that opened with the correspondent Lesley Stahl on a major road at rush hour with barely a car in sight. While they're a testament to China's reliance on real estate as a driver of economic growth and in its belief in the sector as a safe investment, their exact quantity is hard to define.

He's also considered one of the top experts on China's housing market. When I asked him how many ghost towns there were in China, he didn't have an answer. The city was intended in the early s to eventually house a million people, a number that was later scaled back to , But as of , a mere , people lived in it.

Kangbashi eventually managed to lure residents after China moved some of its top schools into the city, Nikkei reported earlier this year.

In , the photographer Kai Caemmerer traveled to China to explore ghost cities. His photos show endless rows of high-rises with barely any indication of human life. They're photos, in fact, that might remind people of what locked-down cities around the world looked like during the coronavirus pandemic. That many empty units could house the population of France.

But unlike parts of the US and Japan, where homes in various states of abandonment and decay have prompted cities and regions to be called ghost towns , China's are different. They're not abandoned; they're just unoccupied. The first thing to understand about China's ghost cities is that they are not cities in states of disrepair. Instead, they are full of new builds that were bought as investments.

They're also a symptom of mismatched supply and demand. On the supply side, Sun said, the government gets big sales revenue from leasing out land to developers. Every year, China starts building 15 million new homes — five times as many as the US and Europe combined, The Economist reported in January. In addition to the government promoting development and driving supply up, there's the matter of China's urbanization rate. Gan said there were flaws in China's urbanization-rate metrics, however, one of which is tied to reclassified areas.

When rural areas are reclassified as urban, the people in those areas already have houses. So while they never moved, and won't need a new place to live, they still contribute to the urbanization rate, he said. On the demand side, the general upward trend of house prices has spawned huge demand for second and third properties, Sun said. Demand for units, however — and this is where the mismatch comes into play — has been affected by a series of factors, said Bernard Aw, an economist overseeing Asia Pacific for Coface.

Among these factors is the increasing unaffordability of homes, an aging population, and slowing population growth. Aw pointed to China's census, which recorded the slowest population growth since the s. Evergrande has more than 1, developments spread across cities in China, which collectively house more than 12 million people, its website says.

Despite the size of Evergrande's scale and debt, the developer accounts for only a fraction of China's housing woes. In , Bloomberg described Beijing's nightmare scenario as one in which people rush to sell off their second properties if cracks in the market appear, thereby sending prices on a downward spiral.

When I asked Gan whether this was the scenario now unfolding in China, he said it wasn't — but not because there aren't cracks in the market. Instead, the government is making it so difficult to complete a sale that it's dissuading homeowners from selling, Gan said. The government can change the number of years you have to own a home. Or if prices are too low, the government won't give you a certificate of sale," Gan said. By doing that, they can prevent the look of a massive price drop.