Last night, 60 Minutes Australia screened an interesting and balanced report (above) examining China’s famed ghost cities and towns.
Below is an extract of the transcript:
We have a lot to thank our Chinese neighbours for.
The Communist giant’s remarkable boom has shielded us here in Australia from the worst of the global economic downturn.
Our mineral resources are fuelling a rush of urban development across China that is simply mind-boggling.
Vast new megacities bigger than London or New York are shooting up all over the country at a rate of 20 a year.
But there are disturbing signs that the bubble is about to burst.
Take a visit to some of these megacities and you’ll find them bizarrely empty.
Brand new, shiny, ghost towns.
Also worth checking-out is the photo gallery as well as the extra reports screened on the 60 Minutes website (see below).
For mine, the scariest aspect of the segment was China’s “new Manhattan” project – effectively a huge partially finished and idle mega city built to rival New York’s financial district. To me, this project exemplifies, more than anything, China’s ‘field of dreams’, ‘build it and they will come’ mentality.
