China’s ghost cities are vacant, and its migrant workers need homes. So what’s the holdup?
It’s more complicated than killing two birds with one stone
By Meagan Day
Along its path to global economic domination, China is experiencing two domestic problems simultaneously: a huge population of uprooted migrant workers and tons of empty housing developments. Houseless people and peopleless houses: shouldn’t those issues cancel each other out? As the Chinese government attempts to play matchmaker, it’s learning that the solution is not so simple.
Mass rural-to-urban migration has roots in China’s one-child policy. In the mid-20th century, population growth put a huge strain on the country’s food supply, culminating in a massive famine in 1962 that resulted in 30 million deaths. In 1979, the country instituted a policy of one child per family — unless the first was a girl, in which case two children were allowed. The policy helped level out the population and ease some of the country’s economic problems, but it also undermined the structure of rural agricultural life. Fewer children meant fewer helping hands, and suffering farmworkers began looking for economic opportunities elsewhere.
In the 1980s, the Chinese economy boomed, creating lots of industrial jobs in Eastern urban areas. China relaxed its strict internal migration policies to meet the manufacturing labor demand. That kicked off an exodus from the countryside which has continued relatively unimpeded ever since, intensifying in recent years. By 2014, there were 270 million migrant workers in China. The Chinese government, believing urbanization to be the key to a modern and vibrant domestic economy, has encouraged the migration pattern.
Moving to the big city may be better than staying put in a failing agricultural backwater, but rural migrants have it rough in Chinese metropolises. They experience workplace exploitation, social discrimination and disproportionate mental health issues. Many are denied crucial services like education and health care because they aren’t listed as official city residents under China’s archaic household registration system, the hukou. In order to be eligible for benefits, this “floating population” of migrants needs to be officially rehoused. But where?
Well, it turns out that while migrants have been flooding the cities, Chinese real estate moguls have been constructing massive, elaborate cities — which are now sitting empty, waiting for residents to move in.
China is in the midst of a construction frenzy on a scale never before seen in the history of human civilization. Between 2012 and 2015, China used more concrete than the United States used during the entire 20th century. A lot of this construction is speculative, and fully formed cities are cropping up with no residents — or, weirder yet, with a handful of residents who work at hotels with no guests, stores with no customers and even airports with no flights.
It’s hard to calculate how many “ghost cities” are sitting uninhabited in China right now, much less how many units each of them has to offer. But Wade Shepard, author of a book about Chinese ghost cities, estimates that “there are around 600 million square meters of floor space still unoccupied — enough to completely cover Madrid.” He hypothesizes that there are 20 to 40 million brand-new vacant units in China. That’s nowhere near the number of rural-urban migrants, but it’s a good start.
This year, the Chinese government indicated that it will undertake a dual effort to unload its housing overstock and to settle its migrants. The ghost cities are no Beijing, but the government is prepared to offer incentives to lure migrants away from big Eastern cities — like subsidies for home purchases, and easy-to-acquire bank loans.
But there’s a major roadblock: Many migrants are resistant to buying homes, believing that they will return to their rural hometowns once they make enough money in the city. “I dreamed about city life when I was young, because many of the villagers who went there bragged about the city, which they said was full of new things,” one migrant recently told the New York Times. “But once I began working in cities, I missed home a lot and was not entirely used to the city way of life.” He said he plans to return to his village when it’s economically viable. His story is common among migrants.
The Chinese government wants its forlorn new developments to become inhabited so that the real estate sector doesn’t buckle under the weight of housing overstock. The government also wants migrants to settle down so they can receive benefits, before the negative social and economic impact on them becomes an insurmountable burden for the nation at large. But in order to convince rural-to-urban migrants to move into its weird, lonely pseudo-cities, China will need to do a lot more than merely incentivize. It needs to convince its migrant population that the country has changed for good, and they might never be able to go back home.
