Peter Day visits Ordos, a largely empty new city in Inner Mongolia, and sees evidence that the great Chinese building boom, which did so much to fuel the country's astonishing economic growth, is over.
Conceived of 20 years ago, as a new town for the hundreds of thousands of residents that the "great Mongolian coal rush" would bring to the region, and virtually empty today, Ordos is believed to be the largest ghost town in China.
For Day, and other financial experts, Ordos is "merely the most spectacular example of a new Chinese phenomenon, in many cities - unsold flats, unlet shops, empty office blocks," which together form the warning signs of an impending economic collapse.
"Western financial experts who fear a bursting of the Chinese real estate bubble point out that the Chinese economy is more dependent on house building than the United States economy was, before the sub-prime lending bubble burst in 2007," notes Day.
Read the full story: Ordos: The biggest ghost town in China
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