In February Brian Dunning did a post “discussing” China’s so-called “ghost cities”. The media has been calling them “ghost cities”, but that sort of implies that someone used to live in it and they are now haunting an empty area. However, the cities have never actually been populated and can actually hold millions of people. If you’ve never heard of them I urge you to take a look at some satellite pictures taken of the cities.
The obvious questions are – why are they empty? Why did China build them if no one is going to live in them? Why is Shanghai is incredibly overcrowded when beautiful new cities sit empty?
Well, those questions are actually really easy to answer, but my point of this post isn’t really to talk (a lot) about these cities, but rather to criticise Brian Dunning’s post as being… a little unskeptical, especially for a “Skepticblog”.
Brian starts off his post urging us to “be skeptical” of what we read on the internet… and then goes on to say (without sources) that there are conspiracy theorists out there who say that China is planning to “forcibly relocate millions of people”. Besides that not being a terrible outlandish claim, the lack of sources for this comment made me go inter-web hunting… and I couldn’t find anything about this. If anyone can actually find the conspiracy theory site that is talking about these Ghost Cities and China planning to relocate millions of people into them – I’d love to see it. But until then, I’m sad to say that I think he…well… made it up so he could post about the cities. The closest thing I could find to any mention of this “conspiracy” was a singular mention of FEMA on those satellite pictures.
So then he attempts to debunk the no-where-to-be-found conspiracy theory and does a pretty poor job of it. (I should say – I’m not a conspiracy theorist – this is simply my exact topic for graduate school and thus it bothers me that someone who is supposed to be creditable… for internet standards… butchers a post about it.) The first thing Dunning says in an attempt to “debunk” is that the low city populations are exaggerated and tries to compare the photos of cities such as Ordos in China with pictures of Helsinki on a not-so-busy day. The glaring ridiculousness of that comparison is that Ordos looks like that everyday, all the time. It is really disappointing that he is trying to make it seem like these cities actually have more people than the media is making it out to be. The cities are – for all intents and purposes, deserted. Sure -some of them might have 500 thousand people living in them, but that city can house up for 20 million. I think we can call that empty and not downgrade the problem by saying “well its not totally empty!” Optimistic, but puts the wrong spin on the issue.
Then Dunning tries to talk about provinces such as Inner Mongolia doing it for investment purposes and again tries to shrug the problem off by saying one of the other cited ghosts cities, Zhengzhou, is just a new suburb, not a crazy enigma. (But still…no one lives in the suburb.)
It’s often the case that the works are not needed immediately, but China knows that they will be soon.
Really Brian? China knows? They’re doing it because they think people will actually live here in 5 – 10 – whatever years? …No, they’re not. These cities will likely sit empty and erode for a very very very long time. Why leave your one room house in Shanghai to go live in an empty city where there are no jobs and that is disconnected from your family?
My point here is that it seems like Dunning has no idea what he’s talking about and so he said some broad POS debunking things that make light of a serious problem and never actually comments on where these cities are coming from. For a skeptic, it’s pretty disappointing and far too cut and dry.
So where are the cities coming from? Well a couple weeks ago Dateline posted a 15 minute documentary about the cities that does an incredible job showing the severity of the problem, how it affects the people that actually do live there, why the cities are still empty and why they were built in the first place.
Why they were built wasn’t because Inner Mongolia had money to burn and thus just felt like building a city… no… The Chinese government had a GDP increase goal of 10%. The central government delegated the responsibility of creating a 10% increase to each regional government. What is the fastest way to increase GDP? It’s to build. You increase employment, spending and all that good stuff that GDP likes to gobble up. Now no one wants to be the regional government that doesn’t report a 10% growth (in China the regional government would not only lose face but would likely face being completely replaced.) China is creating these cities simply for the sake of development. No one lives in them because they can’t afford them.
The world’s second largest economy is pretty much like a balloon right now… It’s just filled with air and is going to pop and be a total wreckage. Then there are the environmental and social issues that these cities bring up. It’s obviously bad for the environment to develop simply for the sake of developing and it is horrible to spend money on tons and tons and tons of useless infrastructure when so many people in the country are poor and in need of social assistance. China is going to have a crap load of old people soon – who is going to pay for them and take care of them? Not these cities, that’s fo shizz. And… it doesn’t look like China is going to stop building any time soon.
It would actually be FANTASTIC if China would take the millions of people they actually are forcibly moving every year to do new developments in Shanghai/Beijing/etc and moved them all to these ghost cities (the mass murdering that Dunning talks about wouldn’t be so great – but China did that once and knows how hard it is to keep it covered up… so likely won’t try it again). Instead their homes are demolished and they are left with very little to show.