China’s Ghost Cities

This is astonishing, mind-boggling:

From Business Insider:

China plans to build 20 cities a year for the next 20 years. The  unacknowledged problem is finding buyers for those hundreds of millions of new  homes.

Last year we published images of ghost  cities based on a report from Forensic Asia Limited. This week we asked  analyst Gillem Tulloch what has happened in the past six months.

“China built more of them,” Tulloch said. “China consumes more steel, iron  ore and cement per capita than any industrial nation in history. It’s all going  to railways that will never make money, roads that no one drives on and cities  that no one lives in.”

“It’s like walking into a forest of skyscrapers, but they’re all empty,” he  said of Chenggong.

And here are some of the images.

This explains some of it:

Alarmed officials have tried to crack down on runaway lending, but their efforts have been hampered by local mayors and party secretaries. Municipal governments typically raise anywhere between 15% to 25% of their annual budgets from land sales to private developers, a powerful incentive to keep building.