China’s Potemkin Cities

Vacant skyscrapers, empty malls: the surreal fruits of a nation’s obsession with growth.

<a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SouthChinaMall_map.JPG">South China Mall Artist's Rendering: Swoolverton/Wikimedia Commons</a>

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THE CHINESE BORDER OUTPOST of Erenhot is part boomtown, part ghost town. Residents are seldom seen in much of this Gobi Desert location, where little that’s green grows on its own. Strips of trees that workers have planted along the roads are buttressed with plywood or have toppled over, their roots blown free of dirt.

But there’s activity aplenty on the town’s construction sites. Over the past decade, scores of empty strip malls and apartment buildings have sprouted from the sand—an eerie skyline visible for miles across the flatlands. At dusk, construction workers headed home on bikes and mopeds are sometimes just about the only traffic on the wide, freshly paved streets, illuminated by shiny new lampposts.

The empty storefronts all bearing the same surreal sign—”Careful!”—make the place feel like a video-game backdrop.

In recent years, economists have raved about China’s double-digit growth—which dropped to a still-impressive 9 percent in 2008 and 2009, even as much of the world slouched through the recession. But this turbocharged expansion is less about the invisible hand than the iron fist: the enormous engine of the state geared to drive GDP at the expense of everything else.

China’s obsession with economic metrics hearkens back to the Mao days, when industrial production stats took center stage. Nowadays, careers of Chinese bureaucrats hinge on two things—growth and lack of social unrest—that are often in conflict. Pollution has been a major cause of dissent, and China’s poor are struggling with rising costs, especially in health care and education. Literacy rates took a dip recently, and some data (pdf) suggest that incomes of the poorest citizens have lagged compared with the rest of the nation.

Despite this, the country has entombed its new wealth in concrete and steel. You can see it in Dongguan, in Guangdong province, where the world’s largest mall stands empty, save for a few hamburger chains. And in Beijing’s tallest building, a year old and still unopened. It is evident in six-lane boulevards where most of the traffic is bicycle carts. And in cities like Erenhot, where the relentless construction continues, oblivious to a dearth of demand.

There is a certain desolate beauty in the barren, windswept desert steppe that surrounds Erenhot. But the empty strip malls with their storefronts all bearing the same surreal sign—”Careful!”—and the uninhabited buildings looming gray and solitary make the place feel as alien as a video-game backdrop. Over tofu soup, I commiserate with a restaurateur who can’t explain exactly what possessed her and her husband to come here a year ago, leaving the kids with their grandparents in Sichuan. Propping her head listlessly on one elbow, she can barely hide the melancholy of having sunk the family savings into an eatery surrounded by vacant storefronts. As for the construction spree, she, too, is at a loss. “Corruption,” she shrugs.

A better explanation, perhaps, stands not far from the restaurant—a sculpture of shiny arrows swirling around vertical bars, projecting up into the desert sky. It is a recent genre of public art that can be seen all across China: a state-commissioned depiction of progress and prosperity.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

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