Week 6: Crazy China Failed - Ryan Tom

Raphael Olivier 2015

Above is Ordos, Inner Mongolia (aka the largest Chinese ghost town). It used to be plentiful in natural resources (coal, gas, metals) and the government decided to invest in state of the art architecture and real estate. (See here for more pictures)

This is a classic example of  failed national aesthetic project. The photographer mentions the failure of this city was due to a failure to long term plan--the real estate was too expensive for larger populations and was only profitable for government officials.

In this example, China was too eager to incentivize industrialization--or it was too eager to industrialize a specific area that it failed to think about whether its people were on board or not. If national image management is promoting positive attributes and shadowing negative attributes--China failed to think WHO would model the positive modern city infrastructure (Ding,2015). The cost of housing was too high--the amount of investment too large. Perhaps from a national aesthetic perspective, they should have made the housing extremely low cost, then people would populate their beautiful city.

Why didn't they do this? All government officials only thinking about ways to promote industry and business without the thought of the people in mind?

Bibliography

Ding, S. (2011) Branding A Rising China: an analysis of beijing's national image management in the age of china;s rise. Journal of Asian and African Studies. 46(3) 293-306.