You know what's also a ghost town? The HAI topic suggestions bin when I don't pin a comment begging you to submit. Speaking of which, please submit topics and, if we use yours, we'll send you a free HAI t-shrt: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfUdlvw6YgU44J8AnM2U_ZvRMyvh_CUM51LYSqF5nYJB9d1-w/viewform?usp=sf_link
My in-laws live in Ordos and I have visited there several times over the past decade. As you mention in the video, the population has increased somewhat recently but Kangbashi is still very underpopulated. What usually gets left out of the Ordos spiel is that, from a global perspective (I.e. not just North American/Western European) Kangbashi is still a decent place to live. The air is clean, the roads are paved, and flowers are planted. For right now, depopulated doesn't mean decrepit, but only time will tell. Beijing (where I live) is in much worse shape than Kangbashi because it was built when China was poorer and things in China aren't built to last. As you mention, they're built to be built. You're free to doubt the merit of a planned economy compared to a market economy (I do), but I just wanted to provide the conext that's always missing from the Ordos conversation.
And it always seems to me that China really doesn't mind building stuff that might take years to fill up properly. Of course private companies aren't going to do that much because investors don't like it, nor will Western governments because voters don't like it, but China seems willing to. The area I live in in Shanghai actually has a video here on RU-vid from calling it a "ghost city on the coast", which is no longer an accurate description. Clearly this one filled up a lot faster than Kangbashi, but it shows China's willingness to play a longer game than some people outside would expect.
I don’t think anyone is saying it’s not a nice place to live . He points out that it cost 180billion dollars to build . It’s weird how empty it is and that they built the city before There was any demand to live there just to increase gdp and keep companies like evergreen working .
5:10 That has got to be the worst sponsor transition, ever. Why would any Chinese need a password manager, when they enjoy free cloud backups of all their personal data by their government?
No he's talking about the Chinese government, not its citizens. The Chinese government is basically Dashlane to its citizens, but what does the Chinese government have to be secure? It obviously needs its own Dashlane service, for itself.
@@JAlonge017 their colleges are about as close to free as possible (university of Beijing, one of the best colleges in china, literally only costs $1200 a year in tuition) but you have to pass and excel in a very difficult sentence exam (kind of like south Korea)
Correction, imagine living in a city designed for 5 times the people it currently has. However i doubt that is actually the case. They are all living in one fifth of the city all crammed around the best parts of that city. So it's more like living in a regular city and if you take a road trip, you first have to pass through the empty bits to get to the countryside.
Robin well I believe that it will still hold up as long as the CCP is still believed in by the majority of the population and continues to function. However if people no longer trust the ccp or something so bad happens that they can’t cover it up or fix the problem. Then if that happens. Well let’s just say that things will be very bad.
Half as interesting going full clickbait ; Title : Why nobody lives in China's $161 billion city Actual video : Why 200,000 people live in a city designed for a million people
The Chinese housing market gets even crazier. For a start, Chinese people like to put their own mark on a property when they live in it, so a decorated property is actually a disadvantage as a new owner would have to strip it first. So a property bought as an investment is worth more if it isn't decorated. So these ghost towns/cities (of which there are many) contain thousands of undecorated homes. It gets crazier... At one point the Chinese government thought people were possibly over-extending themselves with their loans for property, so they restricted the number of properties a married couple could have to the same as a single person. Guess what happens next... Divorce rates rocket! The couples obviously still live together, they're just not married any more, so they can get twice the number of loans!
Also because the apartments are really only empty shells, requiring significant investment to live in, they can not be rented out either. So they just sit. It will be interesting to see when the prices collapse, what happens when the apartment is worth less than the non-existent plumbing or electrical wiring.
@@juststeve5542 They are built cheap but what I believe will sink them is the cost of maintenance. Not now, when migrant labor is cheap, but some day they will get too costly to maintain due to poor quality.
Now they used their ghost cities for covid 19, maybe they will fill the buildings now. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-S8da_QYbyoA.html
"How China's Economic Planning is like the Fast and Furious Franchise" This guy gets to make youtube videos of the essays we wish could have written in High School
Globally there seems to be a problem with countries being able to provide adequate amounts of housing. China seems to have got ahead of the game. It's probably better to have excess housing stock than not enough, and has the benefit of keeping pices low rather than ever increasing pices caused by developers and investors ensuring the shortages continue.
Housing is useless if it's in the middle of nowhere. Lots of empty houses in the West too, there are whole towns and villages abandoned in Spain and Italy, same in Japan. The problem is, nobody is going to live in them, as there's no jobs around.
Ambiguity of the word "city" in China -- The Chinese word "市" (shì) is usually loosely translated into English as "city". However, it has several different meanings due to the complexity of the administrative divisions used in China... ... The choice of definition of "city" used for statistical data of Chinese cities can lead to different results. For example, Shanghai is the largest city in China by population in the urban area but is smaller than Chongqing by the population within the administration area. - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Administrative_divisions_of_China Yeah it is easily confusing.
Its a regional subdivision, or a province, we use the same system here in the PH. Ordos has a pop of 2m and rising, its not empty. Those hi end realstate will get filled up in the future when the regional economy catches up with the coastal cities.
Most of it has already been bought so the builders already made bank. Now, the new owners are just waiting for tenants. Pretty good investment actually with the population growing from 20-30k to 200k in less than a decade. The city I live in took 50 years to grow from 30,000 to 370,000 (small city supposedly only for around 200k).
Oceans of empty luxury apartment buildings with all the units owned by middle-class Chinese investors? Are we talking about Kangbashi District or Vancouver BC?
Alex Gully you have a pretty wide breadth of knowlege for a 12 year old. but yeah, the issue is that it drives up housing prices in the area, forcing people to relocate once rent becomes too expensive. but yeah, you don't exactly want to get on china's bad side by blocking only their citizens from buying realestate as investment. but it'll reach a tipping point where everyone moves somewhere cheaper, and those investments no longer pay off, because the chinese landlords won't have renters to give them return on investment. at that point, prices will likely come down again. but in the meantime, some regulations are definitely good, though i'm not privy to what those regulations are, or which ones are in the works. haven't looked into it. but i applaud your desire to learn of the workings of the world at such an early age.
@Alex Gully yeh the goverment is rich from selling organs and trading and from the people and supporting north korea and the people are poor and have no human rights
Alex Gully oh shit, you really know what's going on. those definitely seem like fair regulations . i wonder if 25% extra property tax might be too much to the point that it discourages all investment. but if the problem of housing price spiking is severe enough that it's significantly reducing the population of once thriving cities, then definitely i think it's warrented, and worth the risks.
Alex Gully buddy hats off to your inquisitiveness that has led you to learn so much at such young age. All that you've said is on point. Never ever change buddy. This need for learning and your good attitude will take you a long way!
Chinese names are always logical and true, like the Chinese People's Volunteer Army, The People's Liberation Army, and The Great Leap Forward (that certainly didn't cause the largest famine in human history).
Building new clean sheet cities designed for walking, biking and mass transit, and moving people out of rural areas and suburbs, would allow the highest per capita carbon emitters like US, Canada and Australia to drastically reduce carbon footprint.
I’ve noticed this is how it is in many places in China. I stayed in a city where my family were the only people in an apartment building. It was very unsettling to see soooo many buildings with no people
@vincent ang We're quite aware of the Chinese government's misguided attempt to relocate everyone into the cities, so they don't have to actually develop infrastructure in the countryside. It still doesn't make sense to have miles and miles of apartment buildings sitting empty until they literally start falling apart due to shoddy construction, without ever having been occupied. Homelessness in the US is an interesting social issue, but it's completely unrelated to the topic of discussion here.
@@jonadabtheunsightly Here is another empty city in China, have a look. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-b9bY-CZ51tE.html, 3000 km away from Mongolia.
Let me get this straight: You comment something that is unrelated to the fact that I have two DANGEROUSLY DASHING girlfriends? Considering that I am the unprettiest RU-vidr ever, having two hot girlfriends is really incredible. Yet you did not mention that at all. I am quite disappointed, dear gh8
the interesting thing is, I went to this city last month, the truth there is totally different......... try to think, its need several years to filled the district, the picture in this video was filmed almost 3-5years ago. hahaha
It’s unfortunate channels get away with this because most people don’t have any firsthand experience in the topic and would just just believe in anything.
@@Martin-wt9co Hong Kong is a Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China. It is allowed to operate semiautonomously for the time being but may one day fall under mainland China's communist rule.
news update: Ordos "ghost town" was news in 2015, and 2020 version is occupancy rising steadily with people moving in for education and retirement, and also cheap property price @HAI
U wouldn't want it. Regular apartments r already poor quality and need lots of maintenance. These r built up even worse cuz everyone wants in on corruption top to bottom.
China doesnt have a great structure for tracking loans. It works like this. You buy a house, you use that house as collateral for a loan for a new house and then you use that second house as collateral for a third house.... and this can go on. Because of the lack of oversight these people have multiple houses with little equity in all of them.
I have been to Ordos, Kangbashi, the museum, the stadium and more many times. While it is correct that this used to be a ghost city that nobody wanted to move to that is long in the past. It's reasonably busy now - nowhere as packed as other Tier 2 or Tier 3 cities like Xi'An, Chengdu or nearby Hohhot - but still something most of us Westerners (I am an Expat living in China) would recognize as a living, breathing city. Especially the center of the city, the part where you showed the performance center, is anything but empty. I was there last on Chinese New Year and the amount of fireworks going off all around me was a clear sign for where people were. (Still your shot of Yu Garden in Shanghai @1.54 is something Ordos will never be able to replicate and that is not even as busy as Yu Garden gets.)
This is a fair analysis of China's ghost cities. A lot of youtubers love to diss China and say that these construction projects failed, but that is not a realistic view. This case study must be examined through the lens of economics, not anti-China politics.
Usually I directly know when a segway into a sponsorship starts. But with this one I had absolutely no clue that the sponsorship was about to start. Well done!
Daaaamn when he mentioned “Ordos” all these flashbacks to “Person of Interest” came to mind.. one of the best shows out there (if you catagorize it with other 24Ep/season shows)!!!! Highly recommend if you enjoyed fringe or like Sci-Fi shows
We have a mall here in Alberta like this city. All of the retail space has been sold, but very few shops have actually opened. The retail space was bought as an investment, but a lot of those investment companies haven't found retailers to rent the space they bought. The place has been pretty deserted since it opened.
I was in Hohhot in 2010. Parts of it are similar. Ghost cities with few residents. I remember going into a supermarket in which all 20 lanes were staffed, but I was one of maybe 3 customers.
Idk why people are talking about this again, it’s called planning and it’s like when 10 years ago they were mocked for building a railway station in a field is now an efficient fully functional city
The name Dōngshèng (东胜) is interesting, by half. Dōng 东 simply means "east" or "eastern". Shèng 胜, in this context, probably means "beautiful vista". Beijing 北京 literally means "northern capital". Nanjing 南京 means "southern capital". The Chinese name for Tokyo, the capital of Japan, is Dongjing 東京, "eastern capital". Tokyo, written in Japanese (kanji) is exactly the same: 東京. (東 is traditional Chinese, while 东 is simplified Chinese, but they have the same meaning.)
A few issues with this video. Despite being called the "Chinese Communist Party", they aren't communist. And the government making projects like this isn't a byproduct of being communist, it's just because they have a sort of planned economy. Planned economies aren't necessarily communist, and communism doesn't necessitate a planned economy.
This is what happens when you build a economy using unfair means, it's a house of cards, it's only a matter of time before everything falls apart Edit- for all the people arguing in the comments, here are my views, I believe that the economy works best when left at the hands of private citizens to decide their fate, government main motive should be to reward innovation and give incentives to private citizens based on how productive and innovative they are, ensuring them that if they create revolutionizing new technology or service that makes life easier for other citizens then they will be rewarded in a capitalist free market society where they can sell their innovation for as much as citizens are willing to pay, the market decide the price as well as prize for their innovation. This motivates them to be innovative, productive and create good jobs in the process of getting rich, it's the back bone of this country(America), for example if someone invest their own time and money to come up with a cure for cancer then they should be able to demand whatever price they deem worthy of their effort leading others to come up with a cure in order to get their share of the pie, leading to competition which eventually will lead to everyone being able to afford the cure since companies would again innovative to come up with a cheaper and better product to gain a bigger share of the market. China on the other hand doesn't adhere to these ideas, they rather engage in market economy just as much is required and use very nasty and unfair policies to boost their economy which eventually will lead to inflated numbers and an eventual collapse
@@robezy0 idk about unfair means, but consider the fact that people are buying this real estate solely as an investment. Without anyone actually willing to move in, the real estate is worth basically nothing aside from whatever money investors are willing to pump into the scheme; speculative investment is the very definition of a bubble And it hasn't been ages, it's been like 10 years since people started predicting; America's housing bubble that collapsed in 2008 started inflating around the 1980s
@@fakename287 The worth of living space results from people's trust in its value. As long as China's rapid urbanization continues and people are flocking to the Western regions, I'd guess Ordos is fine. It's true that China's bubble started inflating not that long ago and looking at America's example, it can take a long while until it bursts. This means that the CCP has much time ahead to react to it though. However, most observers have predicted the burst to happen rather soon (some of them are already in the past) and that's the part I'm not buying.
The housing price doubled instantly in a certain timepoint 2007-08 as the result to carry on the financial crisis happening somewhere in the world. So I believe that something had already fallen apart before what you mentioned.
Really love HAI videos! Constructive critique would be the jokes. In my opinion, less is more because sometimes it feels like every 3 sentences is a joke. The jokes aren't bad, I just think that a little less would benefit the videos :)
