Chinese Ghost Cities Popping Up in....Africa?

Originally posted by Whateva69
These city's remind me of North Korea, that place has people living there, but it still looks empty.

OK now im going to throw my theory in here.

lets say you overthrow a country. what do you do with the people already living there?
really do you think they would happily mingle and live among those who they have just had a war with? no right, so what if you pick them up and plop them down in an empty city. There they are isolated and out of the way.

Now what I would look for is how to move the people from point A to point B, B being the empty city.
How many people does it hold? how many trucks, buses, boats and planes does it take to move that many people? and where are they ?

Love and harmony
Whateva

Theses buildings and apts. aren't isolated anymore though. The Chinese built railways & roads as well as schools and hospital(s). So far I think they've built only one hospital, but plan on building six more...Or maybe a total of six. And the materials are all imported from China. Everything is imported down to & including the nails. I guess they want the money for that stuff kept at home..

Originally posted by othwald
I read about this somewhere else, but can't seem to find the article.

Under Communist rule, you are not allowed to own property. You can lease it for 99 years I believe. After the 99 years are over, then your family has to redo the lease with the government. The Chinese have been on a buying spree in major cities to safeguard their money. To them buying overseas land and buildings are a way to keep their money in their hands and not the governments.

Those apartments will probably be sold to average Chinese who with to safeguard their money. When you look at it that way, it's a smart idea for the people. In addition it shows how much of a failure the Chinese government is with property rights, or any rights for that matter.

That makes sense. Especially when you consider ..

Apartments at Kilamba are being advertised online costing between $120,000 and $200,000 - well out of reach of the estimated two-thirds of Angolans who live on less than $2 a day.

"The prices are correct for the quality of the apartments and for all the conditions that the city can offer," he said. "The sales are going slowly due to the difficulty in obtaining mortgages."

A new legal frame work has recently been introduced to allow local banks to give mortgages, but for the majority of Angolans, even the few with well-paid office jobs, just finding enough cash for a deposit would be a struggle.

"The government needs to start giving priority to building low-cost housing because great majority of the population live in shacks with no water, electricity or sanitation," Elias Isaac, country director at the Angolan Office of the Open Society Initiative of Southern Africa (OSISA), told the BBC.

"There is no middle class in Angola, just the very poor and the very rich, and so there is no-one to buy these sorts of houses."

Link

reply to post by seabag


This reminds me of a scheme I conceived some years ago whereby a large number of displaced home owners could sting the financial industry that screwed them.

The theory was that with enough manpower and capital, you could buy up existing ghost towns such as Rice, CA, build them up mainly with uninhabitable shells, move in a few conspirators to run a few store fronts and give the town some semblance of existence to the average passer-by, rig the inspection and appraisal process by virtue of being remote from anyone not involved in the con, and cook the books on the local businesses and mortgage payments, building billions in false equity, then selling off the seemingly legit mortgages and defaulting on them to let the forclosure mills do their thing with a whole town of worthless chickenwire and stucco.

It could be a simple numbers game for lower-levels officials, possibly including some skimming off the top, it could be a corporate scam to prop up companies that wouldn't make it in this economic climate otherwise at the expense of the government, it could be an insurance or international relief scam, or a way of repurposing funds budgeted for other causes (ie- the government says this money is for building ties in Africa, but rather than doing something useful you give the whole nut to some construction company to do something worthless) etc.

Then of course there are practical purposes to consider. Could be climate change precautions, green-zones for local aristocrats who sell out their contries/provinces, fake boom towns to disperse trouble-makers from China, non-target sites as a backup plan after a nuclear war, or part of a major soft-power initiative in the works.

China has to expand its way overpopulated. And if the Chinese move to Africa they will bring money and business making Africa a better place to live and improving quality of life there. China is building for 20 years in the future. They take places over by bringing money there. Africa needs some guidance. I think its a great thing for China to do. Non violent corporate take over.

Originally posted by seabag

Originally posted by 13th Zodiac
U.N mandated smart cities. Agenda 21.These will come to the States eventually,notice huge shifts in populations?Detriot and other economic disasters,whole cities are being vacated and bulldozed.Then there are the disaster effected area's,where the people that be are making it hard for people to return to their homes.Such as area's hit by Katrina and now the wildfires.Folks are being herded.There was some summit just this week with a U.N official pushing smart cities by 2015.Because us worthless eater's are unsustainable.Futures so bright I gotta wear shades.

My understand is that the 'smart cities' are designed to accommodate large numbers of people populating urban areas. However, these places are going up in the middle of desserts not in urban areas. Typically people show up and urban areas develop out of necessity. In this case China is creating the urban area without the people; back asswards. 

As their population keeps growing like it is, there won't be any work in the cities. People are going to have to move to these rural areas and develop local economies. But they will need somewhere for people to live first and foremost. That's why they are doing this. They won't be empty for long... What will be interesting is if these economies can be successful or not with limited resources.

reply to post by seabag


Great post...Long ago I read how China had built a road through the mountains directly to the middle east that was supposed to be secret back in the day...I think China is always looking to the future.....maybe as an emergency getaway location, or for overpopulation, maybe even a business investment....very good find...I had never heard of this and it reminded me of the secret road I heard about over 10 years ago.

I don't understand why something this bizarre, and probably life threatening, ie. (what are they preparing for???) facing people, in their face, but no answers given, is accepted by anyone. Why aren't people feeling a little threatened and speaking up.

They must be preparing or planning for something BIG.

Fukushima?

Earth changes?

Depopulation events?

Ets coming or something?

WHAT?

there is no ghost city in china, none, not one.. try emailing some reputable china's journalist and they shall tell you, ghost cities stories are sensational urban legend stories posted by nothing to do individual with ill intend.

photo are typically taken when the city are newly completed

we have to understand the scale of china population, with mostly aged villages, and the needed infrastructure to modernise it, they don't built new housing area, they have to built new cities, one city at a time, most are occupied immediately some are delayed by bureaucracy red tape.

with the distribution of wealt so lopsided, if the communist party hope to clings to power, there is no other way other than buliding new cities and they better built it fast..

as to why china developer are building city in africa, there is no why actually, there are just business and money, and then there are more business and more money, the african politician win, the china developer win, the african people win or not only time will tell.

They aren't planning on selling to Angolan locals that's for sure.

Chinese build cities in Mongolia and Tibet. Eventually they get filled up by mostly Han Chinese.
Simplest explanation is that this is more of the same. They will expect large scale immigration permits (in return for prospect of higher earning residents) from the host countries. Most of the host countries will agree.

It's Compassionate Colonialization.

In reality, it may not be so bad---some Chinese will get a less ethnocentric view of the world, and some places which could use the money will get some economic development.

This will be where Chinese will need to go if they have more than one child.

Originally posted by ATSGrunt
I believe China is building in Africa because they may be #ed if Fukushima becomes a bigger disaster than most underplay it to be! We don't even have the means to fix such a disaster, yet we went rampant in making the plants all over so those who thought it was fine to go nuclear got their fat #ing paycheck of course at the cost of innocent lives as usual, this kind of practice on humanity should have been made illegal a long time ago!

fukashima was in Japan? If it made it China somehow.. then they would only be able to fit in .000001 of their population into that city, so I doubt it haha.

I live in China and have done so for the last 2 years.
For those people who are suspicious about the colour coded apartment buildings and the lack of shops and parking areas - this post is for you.
Colour coded apartment complexes are very common. If you walk around in the cities, you'll notice this all over the place. I'm not sure why they do it, perhaps just a lack of creativity, but you can see it pretty much everywhere you go.
As far as shops and parking is concerned. I do see many parking areas in the photos, but if that is not enough for you, most parking in China is done underground in basements.
Shops - the chinese turn anything into a shop. Very often, stores are located at ground floor level of apartment buildings. Generally, no need for additional stores. True, shopping malls are becoming more prevalent in China, but most stores are still on ground floor level of big buildings.

I have not read the prior posts after about page two.

There is only one reason why China would build "ghost" cities out in the middle of nowhere where there is no local, vital industries that would be worth bombing.

I'm saying those are "refuge cities" (my term) for when they go to war with some other country or countries and the missile nukes fall like rain.

I'm betting that they are stocked with food, water and other supplies that a large city would require.

This is highly speculative but interesteing:


A short quote from The Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development, released by the Rockefeller foundation.

Devastating shocks like September 11, the Southeast Asian tsunami of 2004, and the 2010 Haiti earthquake had certainly primed the world for sudden disasters. But no one was prepared for a world in which large-scale catastrophes would occur with such breathtaking frequency. The years 2010 to 2020 were dubbed the “doom decade” for good reason: the 2012 Olympic bombing, which killed 13,000, was followed closely by an earthquake in Indonesia killing 40,000, a tsunami that almost wiped out Nicaragua, and the onset of the West China Famine, caused by a once-in-a-millennium drought linked to climate change

Source (.pdf, page 34)

Now if you click my source link you can see the first page of this study. There is a picture. Earth built up with ones and zeros. But the African continent is a bit different. You see an effect like someone threw a stone into a pond. Suggests that world changes will start there.

As i said this is higly speculative. But this topic with empty towns popping up in Africa moved my fantasy.

One more theory occurs... it's an EXTREMELY remote possibility in my mind compared to the many ideas that have already been proposed...

But what about MOUT training- full scale cities with expendable real civilian populations engineered for the expressed purpose of creating bogus missions to prepare the Chinese Military for its long term future guarding the "edge of the empire" (as Marines are fond of phrasing it)? It would be ridiculously unprecedented in scale, but it would get them past a lot of problems that the US Military never really adapted to.

the chinese are smart because they beat us to it, pretty soon theyll all be dead from aids because they cant keep their junk in their pants, you get what you deserve and there is a consequence for every action

reply to post by DaRAGE

My guess is some form of weapons testing. When we tested our nukes above ground we built up whole mock cities to judge which types of construction held up the best. I'm not saying that it's gonna be nukes though.

My mother seems to think that the reason for the ghost cities in China is so they can relocate entire cities at a time.

The "ghost cities" are suposidly powerd 100% by clean energy.

Once the entire city is relocated, they'd demolish the origional then rebuild.



As for Africa, Japan is a cats whisker from being too toxic to live in thanks to their reactor. There have been rumors Japan's been in talks with Russia about relocating a large % of their citizens there. Perhaps they've had more successfull talks with Africa and China is doing the "Cheap building" for them.

reply to post by seabag


It's a way to boost Chinese GDP. They've been doing this for about a decade now, they hand out absurd contracts to state run companies to build massive developments to record profit and production, then move on to other projects. China and places in Africa where they do most of the infrastructure work are littered with these projects. It's not to "store wealth" ... it's simply to make it appear as if their economy is producing.

reply to post by doobydoll


I think the colors are so you don't get lost in a bunch of buildings that all look the same after a while..

They aren't empty. They are inhabited by people slightly out of phase with our reality who are victims of failed Chinese time travel experiments.