S8 Ep270: GHOST CITIES AND THE STIMULUS TRAP Colleague Anne Stevenson-Yang, Wild Ride. China's growth model shifted toward massive infrastructure spending, resulting in "ghost cities" and replica Western towns built to inflate GDP rather than house people. This "Po

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John Batchelor

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🗓️ 3 January 2026

⏱️ 14 minutes

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Summary

GHOST CITIES AND THE STIMULUS TRAP Colleague Anne Stevenson-Yang, Wild Ride. China's growth model shifted toward massive infrastructure spending, resulting in "ghost cities" and replica Western towns built to inflate GDP rather than house people. This "Potemkin culture" peaked during the 2008 Olympics, where facades were painted to impress foreigners. To counter the global financial crisis, Beijing flooded the economy with loans, fueling a real estate bubble that consumed more cement in three years than the US did in a century, creating unsustainable debt. NUMBER 7
1946 THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is CBSI and the world. I'm John Batchel. The Chinese Miracle. The book is Wild Ride, a short history of the opening and closing of the Chinese economy. First, the opening part, there's been a international banking crisis and the way that the Beijing Chinese Communist Party responds to it, as Anne says,
0:24.4	in their tasseled loafers, is to host cash on the population. And that creates opportunities.
0:30.9	The opportunities, however, look like the creation of a golem monster. And this is Anne's vision, Anne's metaphor.
0:40.3	It works.
0:42.3	But what we have is a change of opinion of the Chinese people,
0:47.3	no longer as Anne writes,
0:49.3	or do you want a home and a car and access to cigarettes,
0:53.3	which at one point were understood to be
0:56.0	keeping your lungs healthy, but you want to be rich, you want to grab the brass ring.
1:01.7	Was this going on all across the country or just the coastal cities, the big cities, Anne?
1:07.6	I think everybody had this idea that they could grab some of this cash that was raining down on China.
1:14.1	Everybody heard about the companies that were listing on international markets and all of the private investment.
1:22.7	And so people wanted to, you know, people in the, in the countryside moved to the cities. They weren't allowed to bring their families, but, you know, people in the countryside moved to the cities.
1:28.3	They weren't allowed to bring their families, but, you know, men and women would move to the big cities and try to get a bit of this.
1:35.2	Yes, and they got a lot of it.
1:36.9	We have the creation of what I came to first understand was something strange called ghost cities.
1:45.0	Now, Anne gives us details about what was going on with this enormous amounts of cash.
1:49.9	There were three Hong Kongs built, two Manhattans.
1:54.4	There was a little Paris.
1:56.3	And there was a red square, complete with an Orthodox church, that nobody would ever worship in.
2:02.7	It was only for background pictures. Probably my favorite is a Manhattan that includes a Javitt
2:10.2	Center. The people who built the Javitt Center, have they ever been there? It's really a windy
	...

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