“Welcome to the city of Erdos, the city of future.” Al Jazeera English Channel reported Erdos, a city in the province of Inner Mongolia, as a “ghost town” in November 2009. The Government planned to let the new town in Erdos–Kangbashen become the city’s administrative center, and become the new home of 1 million people. However the buildings built by government money, stands empty.
Erdos owns China’s one sixth of coal reserves and a third of natural gas reserves. For past eight years, Erdos’s domestics GDP (gross domestic product) growth reached high level of 25%, the double of national GDP growth rate.
One of the important drives for the construction of the new city is to attract the wealth created by the abundant coal resources. It is interesting that in some economists’’ points of view that the “ghost city” is actually a good example of how a resource-rich region in recent years successfully dispose of the huge amount of wealth instead of a symbol of China’s real estate bubble. The people earned a lot of wealth will tend to put their money into the real estate, like buying the houses, as an investment.
However some people considered the construction of the new city is purely a boost of GDP. The government tried to be impressed and gain reputation by raising the GDP through spending more on building a city that nobody wants to live in. The new city was claimed unreality as it is 30 km away from the old city though the government explained the reason why the location was chose was because of considering the water shortage within that area.
Recently the government is trying solve the problem in Kangbashen by moving the Government and 51 departments directly under the authority as well as the elderly, civil servants, farmers and herdsmen and industrial workers into that area.
CHINA’S EMPTY CITIES WAITING FOR 2012-2014.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtolbcVBQmg