How the Chinese Grow Economy: Build Completely Empty Cities

China’s Empty City

http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2009/11/chinas-empty-city/

Al Jazeera looks at the impact of China’s economic stimulus spending:

China’s economy is continuing to grow despite the global recession, helped by a massive government stimulus package of $585bn.

But doubts remain whether such strong growth can be sustained by public spending alone.

Al Jazeera’s Melissa Chan reports from Inner Mongolia, where a whole town built with government money is standing empty.

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ffs that's inner mongolia! who even goes there...

 

that's the way to go

money should be spent in something solid rather useless and soon to be worthless USTreasuries.

 

Does anyone watch Al Jazeera?

It's actually a pretty good news channel.

 

they build empty malls too. the largest mall in the world sits empty.

There was nothing else to do, because the South China Mall, which opened with great fanfare in 2005, is not just the world’s largest. With fewer than a dozen stores scattered through a space designed to house 1,500, it is also the world’s emptiest – a dusty, decrepit complex of buildings marked by peeling paint, dead light bulbs, and dismembered mannequins.
http://www.thenational.ae/article/20080612/REVIEW/206990272/1042

 

I've seen similar "empty" cities in China for the last 15 years. And over a few years, these cities have (so far) inevitably filled up.

The Tsinghua professor quoted in the news report is exactly right in that regard. All of the previous rounds of physical infrastructure in China has paid off economically and socially.

(And by the way, Melissa Chan, why the obsessive need to find a Western face at a Chinese university to present the message?)

 

Yes, AlJazeera is actually very good - I find it a lot better than BBC for instance.

 

build it and they will come has never proven more true than in China,

however, the displaced peasants squatting on scraps of land eeking out a meager vegetable plot are the prospective city dwellers.

with this change comes massive changes in the family infrastructure, social infrastructure and regional town infrastructure.

they really do have over 1.2 billion people to move around, and its something to behold....

 

Exactly. There are two numbers which define China, and is far more important than GDP in any given year:

1) population: 1.3 billion and counting.
2) urbanization rate: 45% and climbing.

China's urbanization rate will rise to 70% by 2035. If you do the math, that means 325 million Chinese currently living in rural villages will move to urban cities within the next 25 years.

And if you do the math again, that means:

- for every square foot of real estate currently in existence in China... it'll be doubled over the next 25 years.

- it also means building 15 New York's from scratch over the next 25 years.

 

Three weeks ago, with much fanfare, a team of scientists unveiled the fossil skeleton of Ardi, a 4-foot-tall female primate who lived and died 4.4 million years ago in what is now Ethiopia. According to her discoverers, Ardi - short for Ardipithecus ramidus, her species - is our oldest known ancestor. She predated Lucy, the fossilized Australopithecus afarensis that previously had claimed the title, by 1.2 million years.

The papers announcing the find described a transitional specimen, with the long arms and short legs of an ape and strong, grasping big toes suited to life in the trees, but also a pelvis whose shape allowed her to walk upright on the ground below.

That, at least, is what one discovered by following the coverage in the Western press, or by reading the scientific papers themselves, published in the journal Science. If you learned about Ardi on the Arabic-language version of Al Jazeera’s website, however, you discovered something else: The find disproved the theory of evolution.

“Ardi Refutes Darwin’s Theory,” Al Jazeera announced, in an Oct. 3 article not available on the English version of the website. “American scientists have presented evidence that Darwin’s theory of evolution was wrong,” the article opened. “The team announced yesterday that Ardi’s discovery proves that humans did not evolve from ancestors that resemble chimpanzees, which refutes the longstanding assumption that humans evolved from monkeys.”

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/i...m_world_creationism_is_on_the_rise/?page=full

It's a crap news channel.