[The Atlantic]Another China's myth busted - Ghost Town that isn't

[DoTell]

Ordos: A Ghost Town That Isn't - Eli Bildner - The Atlantic

In this interview, two documentary filmmakers profile the surprising liveliness of Ordos, a Chinese city famous for its emptiness.

Eli BildnerApr 8 2013, 11:06 AM ET

Over the past decade, the city of Ordos -- a sprawling desert metropolis 350 miles west of Beijing -- has gained infamy as an emblem of over-zealous urbanization. According to a Bloomberg report , in 2010, as many as 90 percent of housing units constructed in the city's Kangbashi New Area lay vacant.



But the reality of Ordos is more complicated, say Adam Smith and Song Ting, two documentary filmmakers who chronicle the new city's birth in a film called " The Land of Many Palaces ."

Ordos (at least the Kangabshi New Area) is frequently seen as a poster child for excessive Chinese infrastructure investment. Your trailer, however, seems to suggest that new residents are actually arriving. Can you give us a bit of background on Ordos? What prompted the new area, and what state is it in right now?

About 10 years ago, they discovered in Ordos one of the largest deposits of coal in China. When they started mining for it, they generated immense amounts of wealth, and the default thing to do in China if you generate enormous amount of money is to build. A lot of promotions within the local government are based upon tangible results -- the building of a hospital, or a school, the appearance of success.

And so this was the case in Ordos. It was a grand plan to build this whole city -- we've seen the plans. It's still unfinished. As of now, they've only built around half of it. Originally, they intended to build capacity for one million residents. Right now, they're at around 500,000.

Talking to people in Beijing, the only thing they really knew of Ordos (before the coal boom) was that it was a poor place, with a basic wool and textiles industry. So the city has gone from being one of the poorest areas of China to one of the wealthiest, in less than 10 years.

With all the negative attention that's been directed to Ordos, has the local government -- or local citizens -- begun to see the new area as a failure? What incentives are the government providing to attract new residents?

I don't think that the government would admit (that Ordos) is a failure. They're still trying hard to bring people in. The government has moved its officials into the new town, and they've also moved some of the city's best schools into the new town, to try to bring in young people. So high school kids -- they have to go to the new town for school now.

There's a huge campaign underway to occupy the city. They're basically giving people from the whole region -- and Ordos is bigger than Switzerland -- incentives to move to the city, or they're forcing them either by moving schools, hospitals, or other public facilities into the new city.

Our initial reaction to that was -- "Oh, that's terrible, that's social engineering" -- but the villagers that we've spoken to are actually really happy about this. Basically they've gone from being pretty poor to being quite wealthy, and they've opened bank accounts, purchased villas, they've got money in the bank for the first time in their life -- they've basically retired with this money that they've been given.

As the new area of Ordos booms, what's happening to the older areas of the city?

The so-called "old city" of Ordos is called Dongsheng, and it has also blown up in size over the past 10 years. There's also a plan to connect Kangbashi (the new city) and Dongsheng to make a new mega-city. So when you take the drive between the two urban centers, which is around 40 minutes on a new highway they've built, you'll see loads of new development, either finished or being built.

But despite (booming construction in Dongsheng), people are moving to Kangbashi too. When we first went there two years ago, the new city was actually quite empty. When you go there now, it is a lot livelier. It's a mix of people: people who have been relocated from the greater Ordos region, people who have moved there from the old town -- for whatever reason -- and other people that are there who moved there in search of new economic opportunities, whether it's migrant workers in the construction industry, or families from Beijing looking to live in a place with more space and less air pollution.

Tell us about some of the characters your film follows. Why did they come to Ordos, and how are they emblematic of the story of the city?

One of the characters we follow is a young woman in her mid-twenties who's teaching mostly elderly ex-farmers how to become urban citizens -- how to open bank accounts, how to have "civilized" urban manners, how to organize their apartments. One of her main challenges is to figure out whether to continue working in a job that's kind of stretching the limits of her ability, or to leave and to live with her husband, who lives elsewhere.

And there's another question she faces: Does she really believe that the farmers are better off in this new city? Does she really believe in this governmental dream that she's involved in?

Because really what we're interested in are the dreams of new China. Firstly, there's a governmental dream -- an overall dream that's been invented centrally by the government -- to create this new, modern, thriving city in a place that has no history of being urban at all. And then there's a familial dream, which is represented by Xu Wen, a sheepherder who receives compensation from the government and moves into the new city with his family. Xu Wen is one of the people we meet who's perfectly happy about moving to the new city. It seems like he's had quite a difficult life making ends meet as a sheepherder, and I think he's happy to retire.

And finally there's a personal dream, which is represented in our film by a taxi driver who moves into the city with the hope of achieving success there. He's been there almost a year now, and he hasn't really moved forward in achieving his dream of becoming wealthy in the city by getting into the property business. He's still a taxi driver. And he's trying to decide, at the moment -- should I carry on? Or should I move somewhere else? He's actually thinking about moving back to Xinjiang, where he spent seven years.

How does what you've witnessed in Ordos match up with the "received wisdom" that the place is a ghost town? How do the stories you've heard complicate the broader story one typically finds in the international press?

To make the film, we had to get approval from the local propaganda department in Ordos, which ended up being a much simpler process than we'd thought. We went to the office, which was in this really big and intimidating building opposite the central plaza and went up to the office, knocked on the door, and we were almost expecting the guy behind the desk to say, "No -- we've had too many negative reports about Ordos, we don't want any more reports, especially from a filmmaker." But in fact, it was the exact opposite. We were told, "We welcome filmmakers, artists, researchers, academics, whoever to come here and to document our city."

The thing that has amazed me about Ordos is how optimistic people are there, and how hopeful they are. In the end, that's the sense that we get -- that despite challenges, people still really believe in this place, whether they have been relocated there by the government, whether they work for the government, or whether they have traveled there from another place to pursue new opportunities.

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This post also appears at Tea Leaf Nation, an Atlantic partner site.

 

[DoTell]

Look Inside: Ordos Kangbashi, A Ghost City No Longer - The China Chronicle

Ordos Kangbashi is best known as China’s most famous ghost city, but over the past year something happened: people began coming. The population jumped from 30,000 to 72,000 in a single year, and the trend looks to continue. Though there is still a lot of elbow room in this new city, which started being constructed in 2003, it is by no means a ghost city any longer.

 

[Kolaps]

Well, it was a real ghost town, a fail example of city development.

Until the local government took measurements to fix the problem. Without it, New Ordos will remain a ghost town.

 

[DoTell]

Well, it was a real ghost town, a fail example of city development.

Until the local government took measurements to fix the problem. Without it, New Ordos will remain a ghost town.

True and false. True that some cities were empty for a while. But false for pinning the cause to be bubble. It has most to do with human psyche - a new town is built out of no where all of a sudden. People wants to live there but may just wait a little bit till everyone else has moved in.


CLSA Analyst: China's Ghost Cities Like Zhengzhou, Wenzhou, Ordos May Not Be as Empty as They Seem - China Real Time Report - WSJ

Is Ordos a true ghost city, or are the people just waiting to move in?


China’s “ghost cities” may be a lot less ghostly than previously thought.

The phenomenon of eerie shopping malls and completed apartment blocks completely devoid of stirrings of Chinese life has been well-documented in Western media in recent years, from video segments to photo series and more.

But according to CLSA analyst Nicole Wong, those reports might be missing the forest for the trees—or in this case, missing the people for their timing. Ms. Wong, who recently returned from a tour of 137 projects in three Chinese cities often cited for their ghostly developments, says that the presence of empty apartments is thanks to some unusual quirks of China’s real-estate landscape.

Specifically, she noted at Tuesday’s CLSA Asia-Pacific Markets Investors’ Forum in Hong Kong, new Chinese apartments are typically sold as virtual concrete shells that buyers must outfit, installing everything from showers to flooring to kitchen sinks to make them move-in ready. Accordingly, Ms. Wong notes, many such “ghost” developments take awhile to gain traction—especially as it’s often the sale of the land they’re sitting on that allows the city to fund subsequent facilities and transportation links that will eventually help make them mature neighborhoods.

“When buildings are first completed they are actually not that habitable, so it takes a long time before most people want to move in,” Ms. Wong said.

In a report on her findings, Ms. Wong notes that buildings completed between 2008-11 in Zhengzhou, Ordos and Wenzhou—often cited as instances of an overly frothy property market—have typically seen tenants move in over a three-year period. Among such buildings, Ms. Wong’s survey found an average of 48% take-up in the first 12-18 months, another 19% in the next year, and then yet another 15% in the year after that. Such a delay, she says, can be attributed to the fact that residents need time not only to fully outfit their units, but many also like to wait until their neighbors have done so as well to avoid moving in before the dust clouds and drilling sounds have subsided.

In the case of Henan’s Zhengzhou—frequently dubbed China’s “largest ghost city”—Ms. Wong notes that a number of media portrayals of the city’s newer areas have used photographs taken between 2010-12, before the metro system connecting the district to the city’s more established neighborhoods was completed. On her most recent visit there in August, Ms. Wong said she saw many cars, “hordes of pedestrians” and considerable ground activity in addition to curtains and air-conditioners installed in numerous residential buildings.

“I asked local people about what they think…about Zhengzhou being a ghost city and the answer is, ‘What?’ They don’t actually have any idea they’re being labeled a ghost city,” Ms. Wong said.

According to CLSA surveys, 65% of middle-income Chinese households report owning just one property, her report notes. But many such property owners aspire to upgrade or buy another, and Ms. Wong suggests they have the potential buying power to do just that, noting that 60% of them have no mortgages.

Still, while the spectral quality of some “ghost cities” may be fleeting, other white-elephant developments built in cities with smaller populations, such as northeastern Tieling or Inner Mongolia’s Ordos, are likely to continue struggling. For example, the deflation of Ordos’s coal mining industry has further hurt the city’s ability to draw new residents, Ms. Wong notes, spurring vacancy rates as high as 37% in certain neighborhoods, a trend CLSA expects to deepen. Some property developers have suspended work, while others have simply fled.

“Ordos people are very realistic,” she says of her visit there. “They say it’s absolutely a dead city.”

– Te-Ping Chen. Follow Te-Ping on Twitter at @tepingchen

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