Chinese Ghost Towns

[GeneChing]

He has explored dozens of buildings in the country and now hopes to turn his hobby into a business working with directors to source film sets and give urban exploration tours.
Mr Connal added: 'There are some phenomenal derelict and unfinished buildings in China. Sometimes they'll get pulled down within a few weeks and other times they'll stand empty for years or even decades.
'Chinese investors take bigger risks in construction. That's driven the economy, but the other side of that is that more businesses fail and go bankrupt than they do in the west.
'When they go bankrupt, they leave the buildings half finished or just move out of them all together.'


Mr Connal said locations like the former Beijing Film Academy could disappear within a few days once the government machine kicks into action


The sprawling film set is split into two sections - a front end covering an area of six or seven football pitches and a second back end that is slightly smaller



Pictured is a metal staircase (left) in one of the large derelict buildings; and rubble in one of the corridors


Many of the buildings on the large site have been stripped down. Early Chinese propaganda movies such as Legend of Old Solders, Wild Boar Forest and Dream of Red Mansions were filmed on the site



Mr Connal has explored dozens of buildings in the country and now hopes to turn his hobby into a business working with directors to source film sets and give urban exploration tours


Chinese directors were told to make their own versions of popular Western films that were banned in the country


Chinese film posters remain plastered on the walls, while scripts and even an actor's ID card was found on site

What a cool creepy location.

[GeneChing]

12 eerie photos of enormous Chinese cities completely empty of people

Sarah Jacobs
Apr. 8, 2017, 9:00 AM 406,831


An empty city in China.Kai Caemmerer

Throughout China, there are hundreds of cities that have almost everything one needs for a modern, urban lifestyle: high-rise apartment complexes, developed waterfronts, skyscrapers, and even public art. Everything, that is, except one major factor: people.

These mysterious — and almost completely empty — cities are a part of China's larger plan to move up to 300 million citizens currently living in rural areas into urban locations. Places like the Kangbashi District of Ordos are already prepped and ready to be occupied.

Photographer Kai Caemmerer became fascinated with these urban plans, and in 2015 he traveled to China to explore and document them. His series, "Unborn Cities," depicts a completely new type of urban development. "Unlike in the US, where cities often begin as small developments and grow in accordance to the local industries, these new Chinese cities are built to the point of near completion before introducing people," he told Business Insider.

When Caemmerer found out about these empty cities, he was immediately fascinated. "As an architectural photographer, I found the notion of a contemporary ghost town to be appealing in a sort of unsettling way," he said.


"Unborn Cities, No.02, 2015," 44 x 55 inches. Pigment print.Kai Caemmerer

"These new Chinese cities are built to the point of near completion before introducing people," Caemmerer said. "Because of this, there is an interim period between the final phases of development and when the areas become noticeably populated, during which many of the buildings stand empty."

"Unborn Cities, No.92, 2015," 55 x 70 inches. Pigment print.Kai Caemmerer

In 2015, Caemmerer photographed the Kangbashi District of Ordos, the Yujiapu Financial District near Tianjin, and the Meixi Lake development near the city of Changsha.

"It was the uniform newness of these cities that originally piqued my interest," Caemmerer said.
"Unborn Cities, No.07, 2015," 44 x 55 inches. Pigment print.Kai Caemmerer

"Oftentimes these 'new areas' are satellite cities located within the proximity of an older, more established city," he explained.
.
Caemmerer would stay overnight at a neighboring, more populated city.
"Unborn Cities, No.01, 2015," 55 x 70 inches. Pigment print.Kai Caemmerer

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[GeneChing]

He photographed twice a day — before sunrise and just after sunset — for 80 straight days.

Luckily, Caemmerer didn't run into legal issues while photographing the cities. "These areas felt very secure," he said.
"Unborn Cities, No.89, 2015," 55 x 70 inches. Pigment print.Kai Caemmerer

Because of the newness of the places, Caemmerer described the cities as "surreal" and "uncanny."

"Unborn Cities, No.46, 2015," 55 x 70 inches. Pigment print.Kai Caemmerer

"Oftentimes, when you're in a city, you can locate yourself within the timeline of that city by identifying different eras of architecture or by interpreting the relative age of the structures and landscape around you. When visiting a city that has been built in just the past five or six years, these indicators of age are not yet visible," Caemmerer said.

"Unborn Cities, No.09, 2015," 55 x 70 inches. Pigment print.Kai Caemmerer

Luckily, Caemmerer didn't run into legal issues while photographing the cities. "These areas felt very secure," he said.

"Unborn Cities, No.89, 2015," 55 x 70 inches. Pigment print.Kai Caemmerer

When Caemmerer did, on the rare occasion, run into people, they were usually intrigued by his archaic-looking, large-format film camera.

"Unborn Cities, No.33, 2015," 55 x 70 inches. Pigment print.Kai Caemmerer

These images are documenting a "complex moment in Chinese urbanization," Caemmerer said. "Many of these new cities are not expected to be complete or vibrant until 15 to 25 years after they begin construction. They are built for the distant future, and at present, we can only speculate on what form they will have taken when they reach this point in time."

"Unborn Cities, No.88, 2015," 55 x 70 inches. Pigment print.Kai Caemmerer

These still look like a lot of fun to explore.

[GeneChing]

Ghost cities are so weird. I wonder how many of these there actually are.

Sep 16, 2018, 07:54pm
China Should Rein In Ghost Cities That Kill The Dreams Of Its Young Citizens
Panos Mourdoukoutas
Contributor


. (Photo by Zhang Peng/LightRocket via Getty Images)

China’s ghost cities make it extremely difficult for young Chinese to buy a home and form a family. And that’s bad news for the future of China, and its financial markets.

China has two types of cities -- conventional cities crowded with apartment buildings occupied by people; and unconventional cities, crowded with buildings with vacant apartments.

That’s why they are called “ghost cities.” They are usually owned by land developers and speculators who count on selling them one day at sky prices.

The trouble is that keeping a large supply of new apartments off the market creates a huge housing shortage. And that pushes the prices for “second-hand” houses ever higher. Shanghai’s Second-Hand House Price Index has soared from under 1000 in 2003 to around 4000 in 2017.


China Newly Built Home Prices KOYFIN

That’s bad news for everyone who is in the market looking for a home to live in, and particularly, for young people who to buy a home and form a family.

“The despair is perhaps particularly acute for the growing legions of young men who can’t find a mate because they can’t afford a house: 70 percent of single Chinese women say that the first thing they look for in a man is the deed to an apartment,” observes Ruchir Sharma in the Breakout Nations. “Meanwhile cash-rich Chinese are buying multiple homes.”

As a result, Chinese people are putting off marriage to a latter age. The average age of first-time marriage in the eastern province was 34.2 years in 2017 - 34.3 years for women and 34.1 for men, according to the latest statistics released by Jiangsu Province's Civil Affairs Bureau. Five years ago, the average age was 29.6 years. And in 2015 it was 32.4.

That could explain why China’s marriage rates have plummeted close to 30% in the last five years.

To be fair, the government has been trying to address the issue by building public housing, but this policy ends up creating more ghost cities. “In response the government is employing land-use laws to force developers to build social housing,” says Sharma. “This leads to a final mismatch. Few young Chinese aspire to live in public tract homes, so some of these developments may become new ghost cities.”

Meanwhile, the big drop in marriage rates is expected to worsen China’s demographic problem. It will lead to lower birth rates, a shrinking labor force and unfavorable “dependency rates” — too few working people will have to support too many retired people.

That’s bad news for the future of the Chinese economy and financial markets.


Shanghai Composite Index KOYFIN

Perhaps China should learn a lesson or two from Japan -- which has already encountered similar housing and demographic trends -- and gets its housing policy right: by placing young families into homes rather than making speculators rich.

I’m Professor and Chair of the Department of Economics at LIU Post in New York. I also teach at Columbia University. I’ve published several articles in professional journals and magazines, including Barron’s, The New York Times, Japan Times, Newsday, Plain Dealer, Edge Singa... MORE
My recent book The Ten Golden Rules Of Leadership is published by AMACOM, and can be found here.

[GeneChing]

See Inside a Ghost Town of Abandoned Mansions in China
Now, farmers are reportedly putting the land of the deserted development to use
By Katherine McLaughlin
August 1, 2023

The State Guest Mansions were envisioned as the palatial homes for the upper crust of society. Now, their only residents are hurdles of cattle and the occasional adventure explorers meandering like ghosts around the arched verandas and stone façades of hundreds of abandoned villas. Located around the hills of Shenyang (about 400 miles northeast of Beijing), the development was originally planned by Greenland Group, a Shanghai-based real estate developer, and broke ground in 2010. But as AFP reports, within two years the project had come to grinding halt, leaving the half-formed skeletons of imitative royalty in its wake. Today the crumbling estates are still abandoned, left in an eerie series of rows appearing like an architectural cornfield.


Makeshift pens corral cattle and other farm animals.
Photo: Jade Gao/AFP/Getty Images

The irony of this formation will only grow more apparent as the seasons begin to turn, as local farmers have begun plowing the land between villas for future crops. Would-be garages of the abandoned mansions are now repurposed as storage for hay bails, and modest two-rail fences corral herds of cows between properties. “These (homes) would have sold for millions—but the rich haven’t even bought one of them,” a farmer named Guo told AFP. The exact reasons for the development’s failure were never made clear, though locals have their theories. Guo said he believed official corruption was to blame and noted that funding for the project was likely cut when the government began cracking down on uncontrolled developments.

[IMG] [/IMG]
The plowed fields of the development were originally expected to be the verdant gardens of the homeowners.
Photo: Jade Gao/AFP/Getty Images
The interiors of the abandoned mansions are perhaps even more poignant than the exteriors. A heavy layer of dust and scraps of garbage are the only furnishing in the rooms, a stark contrast to what appears to be marble floors and columns, crystal chandeliers, coffered ceilings, and intricate marquetry. In what would have been the sales center, a model of the completed 260-villa neighborhood still sits.


A model of the development is seen in the sales center
Photo: Jade Gao/AFP/Getty Images

Developers had already made significant progress on the homes when the project was abandoned.
Photo: Jade Gao/AFP/Getty Images

Ghosts towns are not unusual in China, where an estimated 65 million homes are left empty. For decades, the country’s economy was driven by real estate, so much so that the government often encouraged large-scale developments. But an aging population and affordability concerns, among other factors, resulted in a supply-demand imbalance, at times creating entirely vacant cities. Thames Town, a suburb outside of Shanghai designed to emulate London, is now virtually empty. Kangbashi, or “the empty city,” in Ordos, however, is perhaps the most recognized of this phenomenon.

Wonder why no one bothers to squat in these. I guess the cows are squatting...