A Spectral Existence: Living in a Chinese Ghost City

With more than half of the Chinese population now urbanized and 75% expected to be in the next two decades, the proliferation of new, 'instant' cities in China can be understood as the efforts of the Chinese government to house and provide employment for the fast expanding urban population, inducing them into 'modern' forms of production and consumption, thus fueling the wheels of global capital and China's own rapid ascendance as an economic power house. However, of late, an emerging phenomenon that arises from this ceaseless urbanization is the sprouting of ghost cities and towns across the country. These are defined as cities and towns which lie largely under-populated and under-utilized, and where housing projects serve mostly as vehicles of real estate speculation rather than domestic accommodation. Ordos City (or Kangbashi) in Inner Mongolia is one such product of Chinese hyper-urbanization gone wrong. Contrary to the local government's ambitions to build a global, modernized city in the midst of the desert, residents in this new city are living in the mirage of a future which is promised but has yet to arrive. With the collapse of the local coal industry and China's own impending economic slowdown, this future of Ordos's metamorphosis into a global city looks even more bleak. Discussing the ethnographic data collected from my fieldwork in Ordos City, I will attempt to show how residents manage this dissonance between the promised and the realities of life in a ghost city through their production and consumption activities—informal or otherwise; also revealing the embedded inequalities of class, gender and urban/rural status which have been simultaneously overcome or exacerbated in this rapid process of urbanization.