An empty city built for millions in China's Inner Mongolia
Daily Mail:
This is the command economy "at work." Never mind the laws of supply and demand, you just order things to happen whether people want them or not. I have heard of more such cities in China. There is a bubble there for the bursting, and those who profit from such debacles are probably already hovering.
There are several photos of the empty city at the link above.
...There is much more.
Seen from space, Kangbashi is a metropolis fit to hold a million busy, prosperous people, with sweeping boulevards, a spacious central square, homes, factories and offices spread over 12 square miles and a wide river running through it.
In its publicity, Kangbashi is a super-modern megalomaniac's dream. There is a sculpture park containing dozens of abstract figures in faintly obscene embraces, standing for the unity of the people and the Chinese armed forces.
The whims of modern architects have been indulged, with a drum-shaped concert hall that looks much like a sawn-off cooling tower, and a leaning library built to resemble a shelf of books - next to a sort of giant cowpat coated in reflective bronze, perhaps symbolising Inner Mongolia's dairy industry.
Seen from the new expressway which leads to it, it is a majestic line of towers in the haze. But at ground level there is something severely wrong. Traffic is slowed because a huge advertising hoarding has fallen from a bridge on to the carriageway. Like so much of modern China, sparkling at a distance, grubby and cracked close to, the reality does not quite live up to the appearance.
There is far worse to come. One approach road leads past what was until recently a 30,000-seater stadium, costing £100 million and rushed to completion in nine months for last year's Mongolian Games - horse-racing, archery and wrestling. When it was opened, it looked rather like Concorde about to take off. But soon after New Year's Day, a whole white wing, plus the central peak, collapsed during the night.
Thank Heaven, there was nobody in it at the time. The road to the ruin is closed but it is possible to hurry by and see the colossal wreck, the tangled steel now cleared away but the missing sections not yet rebuilt.
It is not wise to look too interested, as we shall see. Officials have, of course, denied that the collapse was the result of the hurry to finish in time for the Games.
They blame welding defects and the harsh weather (which was not exactly a surprise in this blizzard-blasted part of the world).
Peking is intensely sensitive about such so-called 'Tofu Projects' - hurried and grandiose building schemes, which can and do kill.
Artist and dissident Ai Weiwei has been 'disappeared' by this sinister police state, partly because he made it his business to investigate and expose the corrupt skimping of work, the sub-standard reinforcement and poor-quality materials that led to the deaths of thousands of schoolchildren when their classrooms were shaken into rubble by the 2008 earthquake, which measured eight on the Richter scale, in Sichuan. Japanese schools withstood a far greater earthquake this year.
In 2007 the new 360-yard Tuojiang Bridge in Hunan fell apart as workers removed its scaffolding.
These are just the ones we have heard about. Who knows how many other disasters or near-disasters have gone unrecorded?
This is anything but a free country. A Chinese journalist who tried to take photographs of the wreckage outside Kangbashi, was detained and 'asked' to hand over his pictures. As far as I can find out, there are no surviving photographs of the scene immediately after the building fell. Orders from on high saw to that.
For it is from on high that instructions came to encourage local business to invest in this place, which previously contained two insignificant villages with about 1,500 people in them. And it is from on high that the will and force come, which have created a city out of nothing on the empty steppe.
...
This is the command economy "at work." Never mind the laws of supply and demand, you just order things to happen whether people want them or not. I have heard of more such cities in China. There is a bubble there for the bursting, and those who profit from such debacles are probably already hovering.
There are several photos of the empty city at the link above.
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