
Baidu found China’s “ghost cities” but is keeping their locations mostly secret - tmlee
http://qz.com/540571/baidu-found-chinas-ghost-cities-but-it-is-keeping-their-locations-mostly-a-secret/
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Mimick
I saw a documentary once about two ghost cities, the documentary was 6 years
old and those cites were almost with 0 resident, I saw on comment Chinese
people saying that those cities are full now. It's just China being two steps
forward.

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nbevans
I think I saw the same documentary. They are only ghost cities for so long.
Then the government "seeds" the city by moving some public sector offices
there (which in China could mean 100,000+ workers). That alone is enough to
kick start the city into life.

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Mimick
The thing is that not like those cities are cheap to get an apartment in...
China is more like still having a resident problem than a first world problem
of ghost cities.

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kelvin0
Hey, isn't there a refugee Crysis in Europe? How about filling up these ghost
towns with actual people in dire need of shelter and other basic necessities?

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mastax
China also has (hundreds of millions) of incredibly poor people who would like
to live in one of these ghost cities. The problem is that all of these giant
empty buildings cost money to build and the investors still want to get their
money back.

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schainks
I'll dispute one data point on that map: Xiaoshan, just across the Qiantang
river from Hangzhou. I lived there from 2009-2010. When I moved there it had
recently been renamed/rezoned into Xiaoshan District of Hangzhou city. So
technically, Xiaoshan is not a city anymore. Also, despite an obvious wealth
gap between new developments and "older" parts of southern Xiaoshan, the place
was still _teeming_ with people as Chinese cities do. Xiaoshan had its own
local and high-speed rail stations, too.

Let's paint a brief picture of this place for your procrastination pleasure ;)
I’m excerpting a couple things from my journal, and this is the tip of the
iceberg of what I experienced there.

What Xiaoshan is not: miles of high rises with no one there like other “ghost
cities”. It is instead an old farming "city" with a new high-rises and
pavement slowly taking over from the north. Central Xiaoshan is where the meld
is happening. On the outskirts of Xiaoshan district, pockets of new
developments and factories pepper farmlands like little islands. Joining them
together was a network of new, large expressways with huge road-side
billboards boasting the new “zhejiang high technology hub”. As one cabbie
explained to me about 10 months into my stay, “15 years ago this entire place
was rice fields”. He struggled to adapt to modern life so quickly, and knew he
had to for his family. Another cabbie having a harder time adjusting actually
called me a “white monster” and pleaded I don’t any marry locals or else I'll
bring bad luck to their families.

The only time Xiaoshan felt "ghost" was on these outskirts of these “islands"
where developments abruptly ended and turned into farmland that was scheduled
to be converted soon. Roads suddenly disappeared. Storefronts and commercial
buildings vanished. High rises gave way to farms and shanty towns that housed
pockets of people living in extraordinarily poor conditions compared to what
was half a mile away. People without reliable tap water and electricity, while
I lived in a new high rise less than 2 miles away.

My old bosses thought it would be cheeky to house me in a new apartment
building named after a famous US State. This building was actually a de-facto
high-end local brothel on the edge of the central Xiaoshan “island”. Late
night this place was a Chinese version of Animal House. I'll leave the details
out here, but this building was lawless. Literally - the police handled
_nothing_ that happened there and were probably paid to stay away.

The apartment building was also attached to a mega-mall that was mostly empty
all the time. There was a spanking new digital projection movie theater with
500 seats, a huge KTV, a few struggling restaurants, every luxury brand store
you can think of, and typical department store wares. Movie nights were
interesting. The theater attendance was so low, I’d often be the only person
in a theater with a 70 foot screen all to myself. Sometimes the staff would
hang with me to watch movies b/c they had jack else to do. Foreign movies were
censored in weird ways: I distinctly remember how the audio in Iron Man 2
would always mute the word "Russia". Every time Ivan Vanko's spoke in Russian,
the Chinese subtitles would say he’s speaking Afghani - no mentioning of
Russia/Russian allowed, apparently! I couldn’t read fast enough to know if the
dialogue was translated correctly, though.

Among the “islands" between Xiaoshan and the river also lay fabric and
electronics factories, and compounds for communities of the very wealthy. One
of the best private schools in all of Zhejiang sat in the middle of a high
rise neighbourhood of shiny, expensive new buildings. 15 minutes away, Cisco
had a two tower office complex seemingly in the middle of nowhere full of
people who lived nearby. Hop on the freeway, drive past Alibaba HQ (which
employs thousands), take the bridge across the river, and you're dropped into
downtown Hangzhou, which is still being altered to accomodate larger traffic
flow. Xiaoshan was hardly ghost, but had pockets of activity. Sparse is
probably what you would call Xiaoshan. Ride the bus from central Xiaoshan
through these “islands” of factory workers and technology, and you see a very
dramatic picture of China moving at full tilt.

Xiaoshan was developed very quickly and continues to do what "new"
developments in China do: grow fast and grow big. Many of the "new rich"
residents quickly moved to this district as it rose to escape crowded
downdown. The local government is very focused on turning Hangzhou into a
large metropolis similar in scope to Shanghai. They have a ton of land to work
with still. If I ever go back one day, I’ll probably have trouble recognising
the place. So no, Xiaoshan is hardly a ghost city.

Btw, the G20 next year will be in Hangzhou. Wouldn't be surprised if Xiaoshan
shows up again soon!

Edit: cleaned up my writing a bit.

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Someone
Nice writing, and my 'knowledge' about the state of affairs is way less (near
zero), but for me, you do not refute that it is a ghost town now. At the speed
that China builds 2009-2010 is ages ago. They may have filled the space
between those islands of activity with still empty buildings.

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schainks
Seems as though that's what's happening. I just hopped on Baidu street view
and found a couple new spots about 1km away from my old place. Wtf are all
_these_ buildings:

[http://j.map.baidu.com/EPRRD](http://j.map.baidu.com/EPRRD)

[http://j.map.baidu.com/1tSRD](http://j.map.baidu.com/1tSRD) (looking east in
this spot points you towards central Xiaoshan where there are are indeed
people. West, however, is _all_ new to me)

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NamTaf
The clone-stamped buildings look totally surreal to me. I know why they do it
and it makes sense, but the overwhelming majority of Western cities, which
grow organically over many decades/centuries, never end up with repeated
buildings like that, so it's very jarring to see.

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schainks
Every time. Cobb's dream land from Inception always reminds me of these
buildings.

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Torgo
Is it possible for a foreigner to travel to these cities and take pictures?

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schainks
Absolutely! I used to live in one of those "cities". Just wrote a post here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10515003](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10515003)

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happywolf
I would treat anything from Baidu with a grain of salt, mainly Baidu is not
the most technical competent company, even among Chinese companies. There are
other researches on ghost cities using methods like at night counting the
number of units with lights on and do this for consequtive n nights, or
measure the total power consumption over a period of time.

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hodder
What makes you say Baidu is not technically competent? Andrew Ng's work alone
seems to be on the cutting edge of machine learning and voice/image
recognition.

While Andrew Ng's work gets a lot of press, there appears to be other
interesting work coming out of Baidu in O2O, search, wiki, image,video, self
driving cars etc.

They also appear to be a well run business as evidenced by rapid revenue and
earnings growth for over a decade.

I'm biased as a BIDU shareholder, but that is precisely why I'm interested in
your critism.

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happywolf
Simple. Did you actually use Baidu? I do, on a regular basis.

Let me elaborate

Andrew Ng no doubt is a famous researcher, but I am talking about a common
user's experience, and no, I don't see anything that reminds of machine
learning while using Baidu services.

To give you an example, search for 'Windows 7' in Baidu.

Here is the screen capture of the results I got
([http://imgur.com/nNBSo3g](http://imgur.com/nNBSo3g)), basically there is no
mention of Microsoft's site. I do see the first is the link for people
download this software for free. Ok, where is the machine learning? There
could be a few reasons explaining this behavior, but I don't wish to go into
those. To say the least: if it is not technical issue, it is ethical. Both are
very important to shareholders.

As a control, I searched for the same on Google, and the first 2 results are
from wikipedia, while the rest are from microsoft.com, mixed with news results
from news sites, which are very to the point.

Another example, Baidu's SDK has opened up security holes up to 100 million
Android devices ([http://www.engadget.com/2015/11/02/bunk-baidu-sdk-puts-
backd...](http://www.engadget.com/2015/11/02/bunk-baidu-sdk-puts-backdoor-on-
millions-of-android-devices/)), and unfortunately, this isn't the first
incident in 2015. As far as I can recall, there are at least 3-4 similar
issues, unintentionally or intentionally caused by technical incompetency.

Disclosure: I worked in China for some time and now still got business
connection with it. I am not an armchair warrior to bash China.

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ethanbond
It seems unfair to jump from "it's a shoddy product" and "they introduced a
security hole" to "they're not technically competent."

A lot of American and European companies have done, and consistently do, the
same things. It seems like there's some hypercriticism due to underlying
suspicions of intentionality – however well-founded those suspicions may be.

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happywolf
No doubt there are good people in Baidu. This happens everywhere, including
the now defuncting Nokia, however those people are not put in good use.

To turn the question around: what makes you think they are technical
competent? Can you provide 2 examples instead?

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Gigablah
1\. I searched for "cars" on Baidu. I got search results with cars.

2\. I searched for "cats" on Baidu. I got... the musical, a pop group... okay,
maybe you're right.

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wahsd
I would like to just say that Quarz is SUCH A GREAT new journalism portal. It
seems to strike a solid balance of covering major global developments by
touching on a linchpin issue and describing that aspect thoroughly and in an
easy to understand manner.

