China

[Shapley]

Ghost Towns Of China: Amazing satellite images show cities meant to be home to millions lying deserted

Overbuilding on a massive scale? Make-work projects to keep the people placated? What is happening in China?

[piqaboo]

The article confuses me.
These developments are sitting ~ empty ( I see cars in several photos where its claimed there is no sign of life, no cars, etc),
and so prices should be way down.
In the main cities (places where people have wanted to live from way back), prices are rising.
It some how seems to say that the high prices in the cities are the cause of the empty developments out in the back of beyond.
Makes no sense.
Seems more like - no one wants to live there. Period, full stop. There is no there there, so to say.
People do want to live in the existing cities. China built in the wrong places.

BTW - where did those wealthy miners of Ordos go, if not to the city built for them?

Also, I wonder if some of those were evacuated to make room for dams?
I drove thru a New Zealand town like that once. Weird. People leave the strangest things behind when they move out.

[Shapley]

I suspect you are right that people don't want to live there, although in China that doesn't necessarily mean much. If China wants people to live there bad enough, they will live there. They can make them an offer they can't refuse.

I think the article is suggesting that the housing inflation bubble will collapse there just as it did here, because of overbuilding. If this is, in fact, overbuilding, that may be possible. I think it's possible China is designing model communities from the ground up, and not opening them until complete. It is possible that they have been built for as-yet-to-be-relocated peoples to make room for dams or other projects where existing cities now stand.

You can never tell with the Chinese, they have their methods, and they don't always share what they're doing with outsiders, or even with each other. And, as I have noted, patience was invented in China.

This article, from last month, suggests Ordos is still growing:

Goodbye Shanghai, Hello Ordos

[dai bread]

When you have surplus cash in the trillions, (whatever currency) you can build what you like where you like and wait as long as you like.

[piqaboo]

'zactly.
And this may be part of a two stage move.
When the farmers get moved into apartment buildings and off their land,
the buildings get beat up fast, as the farmers arent too quick to adjust.

It may be that they're putting country folk in high rise apartment buildings first, to learn
about suburban and urban dwelling, before moving them into the nice clean pretty cities.

One nevers knows.
But I dont think those empty cities will affect prices in the major ones.
Beijing, Shanghai etc have many things making them attractive places to live.

[dai bread]

I wonder if migrants are still lighting wood fires in the ovens of electric stoves?

Some of our early Pacific Island migrants did that, but I think word has got around now that there are several thousand of them here.

[Haggis@wk]

China Muscles Australia Over Defense And Trade.

If there were ever any doubts about China’s aggressive military intentions in the Pacific, its warning to Australia last week to choose itself a U.S. or Chinese “godfather” ought to remove all of them.

In what can only be construed as a direct threat to a top U.S. ally, Song Xiaojun, a “retired” Chinese general, told the Sydney Morning Herald that “Australia has to find a godfather sooner or later.”

“Australia always has to depend on somebody else, whether it is to be the ‘son’ of the U.S. or ‘son’ of China,” Song said, adding that Australia had best choose China because it all “depends on who is more powerful and based on the strategic environment.”

Maybe we should give Australia nukes.

[Giant Communist Robot]

From the Shanghai Daily's review of Song Xiaojun's Unhappy China:

bitter rant of ultra left-wing intellectuals who feel sidelined under Beijing’s policies of reform and opening

It takes all kinds to make a world.