During the past score of years, several hundred new cities have been constructed in many different areas of China. These new cities: Some are large and some are small, some are independent self contained units out on the edge of nowhere, and some are nearby adjuncts to large and older cities.
This seemingly frantic and hideously
expensive building frenzy has produced an uncountable number of cities that are still largely
uninhabited, and the announced intention is to continue this rapid escalation
at the rate of 20 new cities each year for the next 20 years. If the sum of all these building projects is
ever completed, and if ever the citizens do move in, it is said that this would
be the largest mass migration in the history of planet Earth.
Take for example, the new city of
Jing Jin. This project is located south
east of the national capital, Beijing.
The entire city was planned to cover 100 square miles, with a major city
center and wide spread suburban areas.
Construction at Jing Jin began in
2002, and thus far 3,000 suburban single family villas have been built, each on
its own spacious plot of ground, and plans are in hand for the construction of
an additional 4,000 similar villas. But,
currently Jing Jin is just 2% occupied, and the rest lies abandoned.
The city also contains two colleges,
a museum and a golf course, a hot springs resort, as well as a huge number of
shops with only a few in operation. A
multi-storeyed 5 star Hyatt Regency Hotel with a capacity for 800 guests is
largely empty.
Jing Jin lies an hour drive from
Beijing, but it is just too far for residents to make a daily commute to the
capital city.
Fifty miles inland from Hong Kong
lies another massive building project, the New South China Shopping Mall. This huge shopping center was built on
confiscated farmlands and it was planned as the largest shipping mall in the
world with space for more than 2300 different shops. The facility lies almost unoccupied, with 1%
in use, and 99% abandoned.
Twenty miles outside Beijing,
another grandiose project lies in demolished ruin. The Disneyland style Wonderland Amusement
Park was intended to become the largest amusement park in Asia. Work began on this 120 acre project in 1998,
and well before completion it was abandoned.
Fifteen years later, what was left
was demolished and the land was taken back by its previous owners. Tentative plans have called for a luxury
supermarket on this isolated location.
There is one abandoned city in China
that has been left vacant for another reason altogether. The city of Beichuan, with its population of
160,000, is located almost in the center of the nation of China.
In 2008, a massive earthquake rated at 8.0
destroyed most of the buildings in Beichuan, with the death of 100,000 people,
including more than 1300 children at two high schools. Instead of rebuilding at the same dangerous
location, another city with the same name was built for the survivors some 15
miles down stream.
Described as the world’s largest abandoned city is
Kangbashi, on the edge of the already inhabited city of Ordos in the territory
of Inner Mongolia. Planning for this
huge new city began in 2003, and construction work began just one year later.
Original planning called for
construction on a total of 137 square miles, though work on only 14 square
miles has been completed. This new city
would hold one million people, and the total investment would involve $161
billion. However, Kangbashi is only 2%
occupied, snd the rest is going to rot and ruin.
As completed, Kangbashi has a
multi-storeyed unfinished and largely unused hospital, a huge sports stadium
complete with unoccupied seating, a futuristic style museum with almost no
items on display, an unusual style library with practically no readers, and
wide well planned thoroughfares with almost no traffic. There is a five-storeyed food court, with
almost no food available, and a Dancing Music Fountain, the largest in Asia,
with a tourist display each evening but very few to watch it.
What about the radio scene in this
fantastic and largely unused fabulous city?
If the city is largely abandoned, then you would expect that there are
no radio and TV stations within the city itself. If
that is your expectation, then you would be correct. There are no active radio and TV stations in
Kangbashi New City.
However, there is a major radio and
TV service in the nearby parent city Ordos, which provides electronic coverage
to the few who have taken up permanent residency, some as squatters, in the new
Kingbashi. The government head office
for the Bureau of Radio and Television in Ordos is located on
E'erduosi
Street in the district Ejin Horo.
The Ordos Broadcasting station is
located at Manduhai Xiang in Dongshen Ou, and it provides four channels of
radio program service, with nine active transmitters on both mediumwave and
FM. On mediumwave are four transmitters,
each rated apparently at 10 kW. The
frequencies for these four transmitters are: 603 792 896 and 936 kHz.
That is the story of Kangbashi New
City, which is touted as China’s
most famous tourist city.
(AWR/Wavescan NSW 372)
