Chinese Ghost Cities That Came Alive
bullionstar.com
bullionstar.com
The article is a list of places that are not ghost cities, even though they have been described as such by idiots in the press.
>It’s actually extremely difficult to cross the street in Wujin, which doesn’t bode well for the argument that it’s a ghost town.
Did you read it? The linked article is pointing out that these cities are not ghost towns at all.
I'm actually surprised to hear that it was previously a ghost city, it's been a very busy spot since I was first over here around 5 years ago. It's also a little strange to hear it called a "city", it's more of a district in the centre in what was already a very large city.
However, the real ghost cities are mostly not going to be the ones you see in the media, for the reason of not shiny enough. If a project is on the failing trail, both the government and the developer will try to back off, to cut loses. So if you see the buildings are properly finished and streets well maintained, just lacking people, then it means the government and developers have not lost hope, and usually they have some good reasons.
I feel like this is the origin of it. In the US, we seem to take a much more short term view of "urban planning" - rather than being laid out up front to support high density, cities more typically grow via low density sprawl on demand.
The idea of having a city (or district) constructed from the ground up to efficiently meet the needs of citizens 15 years in the future is alien to most of us. The context in which we typically encounter large groups of vacant buildings and empty streets is one in which something has gone wrong, which I think is why we find the "ghost city" narrative compelling.
Business as usual in the world of journalism.
http://www.cnn.com/2015/01/19/world/gallery/china-tianjin-gh...
Also Vice had an episode featuring ghost towns: http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/explore-chinese-ghost-towns...
Yes our news media likes to hype up anything China these days. The problem with overdevelopment is not that the cities remain empty, it is the debts that come with them (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-01-04/china-s-ci...). I can imagine many Chinese cities with flashy buildings are deep in debt, American style.
http://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/04/ordos-a-gho...
Latest maps show beginnings of a bustling city... Wiki show 2m pop.
Chinese really believe in build it.. They will come...... Eventually in hordes.
http://gizmodo.com/4-instant-cities-that-are-still-completel...
Quote:
>Today, the real-estate situation in Ordos has turned macabre. Video billboards along the city's major roadways display mug shots of fugitive developers who have skipped town, fleeing their debts. There are rumors about the dynamiting of buildings in Kangbashi: about owners of unoccupied apartment towers who hope to create value through destruction, reselling freshly cleared land to new investors.
The NYT piece itself is much more carefully hedged. The TL;DR by the reporter: "IN SHORT, ORDOS is not empty, but it is odd"
A real estate bust implies that investors lost money but not necessarily a ghost town. Anyway the Ordos story was a lot more market driven than the other ones: for a while when coal price was dear Ordos boasted the highest per capita income in all of China. Also land is a lot cheaper in this unpopulated area.
There are cities in china you've never even heard of that have populations bigger than most major u.s. cities. In something like 50 years the Chinese went from a poor 3rd world country to 1st world, pulling over 500 million people out of poverty and into the middle class.
The u.s. view is stuck in the 1960s-80s view of China. Even the chinese food in the u.s. is old-fashioned and not modern compared to what's in China now.
Such as the PRC government.
http://english1.english.gov.cn/links/cpc.htm
It's Socialist, too
http://english.gov.cn/archive/white_paper/2014/09/09/content...
> In something like 50 years the Chinese went from a poor 3rd world country to 1st world, pulling over 500 million people out of poverty and into the middle class.
So did the Soviet Union. The thing is, you can only have an Industrial Revolution once.
> Even the chinese food in the u.s. is old-fashioned and not modern compared to what's in China now.
Chinese-American cuisine is completely separate from what's eaten in China and must be understood as its own cultural entity.
http://en.people.cn/100668/102793/7980397.html
> In June 1992, Comrade Jiang Zemin explicitly put forward the concept of "socialist market economic system" for the first time on the basis of Comrade Deng Xiaoping’s southern talk.
Socialist market economy. If the government says it, that means it isn't an oxymoron.
Money quote:
> As Comrade Deng Xiaoping pointed out, "The essence of socialism is to liberate and develop productivity, to eliminate exploitation and polarization, and ultimately achieve common prosperity." The ultimate goal of the reform of socialist market economic system also points to "common prosperity". Therefore China should continue to shape its path for structural reform by this goal. Two aspects of China's economic reform are thus highlighted. The first is to further enhance the efficiency of the market by introducing market mechanisms, and the second is to provide better public service by reforming the means of planned economy, improving the capacity of macro-control and facilitating transformation of government functions since the capacity of public service provision is the primary ability in building a society of "common prosperity".
Market mechanisms in a planned economy. Macro-control (implying micro-invisible hand, I suppose). Common prosperity.
Eh, I snark, but it's an interesting experiment. I just wish it weren't being run in a context where there's no ethics review board.
They do now, in this post-1991 world.
> They refer to political alignment with the United States (first), USSR (second), or unaligned (third world).
So China was Third World in 1990? That's not going to be very defensible, except in terms of the definition you just gave, which lost all relevance in 1991.
My point is, the meanings of the words have changed, and trying to use them in their original sense now is just perverse. The original sense was predicated on a political reality which is now gone.
What is perverse is the widespread abuse of long-established academic terms with precise and well known meanings as co-opted euphemisms because one is too embarassed to simply say "rich" or "poor" when that is what one in fact means.
How do you think words get meanings in the first place? Do you think they're handed down from on high?
Just as words sometimes change meaning, there are many more cases where some people provisionally use a word with a new meaning, but this new meaning fails to take hold and vanishes. This happens when enough other people fail to adopt the proposed new meaning, and stick to the old meaning.
In this case, I am one of those people, and I am encouraging others to do the same. I believe I have very good reasons, and I am sharing them.
Redefining first and third world to mean "rich" and "poor" is unnecessary since we already have words for those meanings, and we have no other convenient words for what "first world" and "third world" conventionally mean in their original usage.
The desire to redefine them is in my opinion solely motivated by the desire for a euphemism to say something "nicer" sounding than "poor." Well, "poor" is not a nice thing; it's never going to sound nice. That desire is merely the euphemism treadmill at work. if you are going to call a group "poor," at least have the decency to say so directly rather than trying to hide behind a euphemism.
Besides, we have no other convenient words to say "aligned with capitalism during the Cold War" and "unaligned with either capitalism or Communism."
China is regarded as 1st world now? My understanding is that the economic advances has been limited to a portion of the population and a big chunk of the population is still quite rural and poor.
For example, the number of boys Vs. girls in China is likely going to result in either a civil war or worse another international conflict 20 years from now. An extremely unhappy population is not constructive for world peace (or even inter-China peace).
I am extremely concerned about that powder keg and everyone else should be too. What does a society do with a bunch of unhappy 20 something males typically?
And three very prominent opponents of Malthus are Marx, Engels and Lenin.
The one child policy is not particularly communist.
edit - Also, China has an insanely long literary history, if I was going to place bets I'd start looking for the sources of the one-child policy somewhere in there before going to people like Malthus or Marx. That said, the policy is without a doubt far more Malthusian than it is Marxist.
edit2 - here's a guess - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Lord_Shang