China Builds ‘Ghost Town’ in Inner Mongolia

The thinking might have been: Build it, and they will come.

The Chinese government built it from the ground up, a sprawling city complete with museums, library, opera house, and homes and apartments for 300,000 people.

But they didn’t come, and today the city stands like a ghost town in the grasslands and desert of Inner Mongolia.

The city of Ordos in Inner Mongolia has the highest per capita GDP of any city in China, thanks to the region’s vast deposits of coal and natural gas. When the river ran dry, the government decided six years ago to “move” the city to a water supply 15 miles away. It began constructing the new city of Kangbashi for the residents of Ordos and others expected to flock to the region for its well-paying jobs.

A reporter who visited Kangbashi in October 2009 found a state-of-the-art metropolis full of architectural marvels, with sculpture gardens and a vast public square. But the city was virtually empty, except for its massive municipal complex.

Officials said they expected the city to house 100,000 this year and 300,000 by 2020. They also said the population had reached 50,000, “which seems improbable given that pedestrians on the street were outnumbered by street sweepers,” the reporter wrote in Foreign Policy magazine.

More recently, a journalist who visited Kangbashi reported on National Public Radio that the city remains a virtual ghost town today, and many of the 30,000 residents who do live there are in fact construction workers still building row upon row of high-rise apartments that for the most part stand empty.

The city, the NPR report noted, is “just waiting for people to move in. Problem is, nobody seems to have gotten the memo. Just 30,000 people live in a city built for 300,000.”