“BUILD it and they will come” is a favourite saying of gung-ho developers who love nothing more than an open tract of land they can tear up and sow with new buildings like a farmer seeding a freshly-ploughed field. Nowhere on earth these days is that ethos in effect as in China, with its runaway economy.

Television audiences in several parts of the world have recently been treated to reports of vast ghost cities springing up all over China. These cities, with block after block of brand-new, high-rise buildings sweeping open plazas, shopping malls and other features of a modern urban space are going up on what used to be farmland; some close to existing urban centres, others in the middle of nowhere. One such programme I watched last week showed Disneyland-inspired theme areas made to resemble an English town or Paris with a scaled-down Eiffel Tower or squares with magnificent statues and decorative architecture. The video crews were shown block after block of high-rise apartment and office towers with two or three tenants apiece.

Some reports claim as many as 24 new cities go up each year. China’s middle and upper classes, with their new-found wealth, buy many of the new units for their investment value, but have to leave them empty because they can’t find tenants who can afford the rent. About 15 years ago China introduced a new policy allowing people to buy their homes, and this opened a flood of eager nouveau-riche urbanites clamouring to buy as much as they can. To them, real estate is a solid investment, fetching better earnings than the banks and more reliable than stocks and shares.

Foreign financial interests have criticised this burgeoning growth, suggesting that it’s unlikely to last, but others say this approach is short-sighted since, after decades of non-existent or sluggish growth, China has an enormous pent-up need for decent housing. The country’s policymakers have focused on urbanisation as an important engine of growth, hence the surge in building.

We have to remember that in many of the country’s teeming cities, the average family lives in dormitory-like settings or cramped apartments with not much more than basic provisions.

We have all read and heard about ultra-modern, high-speed trains linking many big cities — even one conquering a whole slew of natural obstacles to link the capital, Beijing, with the far-flung region, Tibet, which China absorbed a half-century ago.

As industries developed, the planners had to provide new highways, power stations and distribution lines, water supplies, ports and air connections. Every year, seven to eight million people enter the workforce, and apart from finding them places to live, the planners have to find something for them to do. Putting up cities soaks up a considerable amount of labour and raw materials as well as surplus money generated by the explosive growth of the economy.

Miscalculations result in “ghost cities”

Indeed, several so-called ghost cities do exist, and they are the ones which have attracted international attention. Perhaps the most extreme case is the city of Ordos, in Inner Mongolia, a sparsely-populated desert area rich in minerals with the highest per capita GDP in China. Flush with cash from the economic boom, the local Government invested lavishly in public projects, including the Kangbashi New District, about 25 kilometres from the old town centre, where the majority of the city’s 1.5 million people live. It was built several years ago to accommodate a million people and is replete with government buildings, office towers, museums, sports fields and theatres sprinkled among vast subdivisions made up of bungalows, duplexes and a mix of high- and low-rise apartment blocks and punctuated with stunning examples of modern architecture and public monuments. But it remains largely empty.

Another example is the New South China Mall just outside the industrial centre of Dongquan in Guangdong province, which some people describe as “the world’s factory” because of its vast number of factories making textiles, garments, toys, appliances and what-not. It’s located between the provincial capital, Guangzhou, and the growing industrial city of Shenzhen, both popular with shoppers. As the economy of the region developed, industries spread out to smaller centres where wages were lower and workers abounded. So the crowds stayed away in droves, as the say, and the mall sits there, unused.

It’s become a fashion among many western financial analysts to describe China’s seeming excess in throwing up these instant cities as a bubble about to burst. But the more level-headed observers admit that, while there are excesses such as the ballyhooed ghost cities, those are few in number and do not represent the true state of affairs. In a report, Ting Lu of the Bank of America writes that the few ghost areas came about because of “failures in city planning and irrational over-building”.

Consider this: Since 1995, China has built 129 million new urban homes, and the economy has been growing so rapidly that there are bound to be dislocations. In addition to the lightning-quick economic growth, China’s urban population is still growing rapidly, and, these economists argue, things will eventually sort themselves out.

Rewind

ADDENDUM to last week’s column: A constitutional court in Guatemala has overturned the ruling against a former president, Erfaín Ríos Montt, for genocide and crimes against humanity. You will recall that last week I described that country’s history of brutality towards its indigenous population. The highest court ruled on Monday that the trial which sentenced Ríos Montt to 80 years in prison has to be rewound to the middle of the proceedings.

After two months of testimony, a panel of three judges found that the 86-year-old retired general knew about the army’s massacre of at least 1,771 Mayans in the countryside but did nothing to stop it. Now the high court has overturned the sentence — at least for the time being. It says the trial has to go back to April 19, when Ríos Montt was temporarily left without legal representation because his lawyer had been expelled from the court after he accused the judges of bias against him and demanded that they be dismissed from the case. So now the witnesses, who from that date on described the painful experiences they had gone through, will have to relate them all over again. The court will also have to hear concluding arguments one more time.