Located in the northwest of China, an abandoned town with a series of unfinished villas. Since no one lived here, the farmers took advantage and began to use this fallow land to grow crops and raise livestock.
In 2010, Chinese real estate giant Greenland Group broke ground on the State Guest Mansions project on the outskirts of Shenyang city. This project plans to build up to 260 European-style villas to house the city’s super-rich.
But only 2 years later, this project was canceled.
The unfinished villas have become inhabited by local farmers, who plow the land and plant crops right on the overgrown lawns in front of and in the abandoned villas. Abandoned houses in an unfinished state, naked, like dilapidated tombstones scattered across the vast wasteland.
There are no millionaires here. Instead, the main “residents” were the variety of livestock and livestock that roamed outside the European-style villas.
The inside of the buildings also looked like post-apocalyptic ruins. What was once expected to be a paradise for China’s emerging rich, is now rotting on the vast expanse of land.
Guo, a 45-year-old farmer who moved to the “ghost town”, said the project may have been abandoned: “These houses could have sold for millions of dollars, but then the rich didn’t even buy one.”
These half-built villas have also attracted the attention of some users on Weibo, China’s social network. Some Weibo users questioned why the government did not intervene or take the land.
“This place has been abandoned for years,” wrote one Weibo user.
“Only ghosts can stay here!” another Weibo user commented.
On social networking sites like Douyin, China’s version of TikTok, there are videos of people exercising in abandoned apartment buildings. In some videos, people can be seen moving their bed frames into unfinished apartments and cooking meals in makeshift kitchens, with no choice but to live in unfurnished apartments. .
When abandoned in mass, these large projects can turn into “ghost cities”.
Li Gan, an economics professor at Texas A&M University and director of the China Household Finance Research and Survey Center at Chengdu Southwest University of Finance and Economics, said ghost cities are “a phenomenon unique to China.” The imbalance caused by supply exceeding demand has led to abandoned projects popping up all over China, he said.
