The great retreating tide of wasted credit that defined China’s development in the last seven years has left behind, in forgotten byways, a landscape of ghostly urban desolation.
They come like snapshots of de Chirico paintings: Clusters of condominiums towering over dusty towns. Vast shopping malls where the echoes are louder than footfall. Metal mines in rust-belt country with piles of excavated minerals still waiting for delivery trucks that never came.
Now, more than three years after the Communist Party began to tighten up on austerity measures, add to the list the dull gray hulls of the Chinese government office.
In once prosperous seaboard provinces, an interdiction on “office buildings that don’t meet requirements” – as the official terminology goes – is coining a new term among local residents: “sleeping buildings.” The front yards of these ghost buildings, China’s official Xinhua News Agency reported, have been turned into vegetable plots, sheep farms or trash dumps.
These are the remains of what took shape in July 2013 as a collective repudiation by the Communist Party on an era of excess. The State Council, China’s equivalent to a cabinet, ruled that there would be no more banquets, gifts or waste.
It was all about going “back to the masses,” part of an intense internal campaign that helped to concentrate power in the hands of President Xi Jinping. Famously, the president’s image-makers made much of his preference for simple fare: “four dishes and a soup,” exemplifying the new restraint.
It sometimes went further. Mr. Xi didn’t much like odd new architecture either, it seemed.
Mr. Xi has few of such worries about these slumbering buildings, where empty driveways are now overgrown and overrun. The buildings all seem to have the distinctive anonymity of the modern Chinese style: bluish glass over grayish cladding in featureless oblong hulks, as uniform as Mao Zedong tunics once were. The only thing they don’t have is people. http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2016/05/21/in-chinas-new-austerity-ghosts-now-haunt-government-offices/
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