Ghost Cities of China by Shepard Wade

Author:Shepard, Wade
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zed Books
Published: 2015-07-27T16:00:00+00:00

What mega-regions look like

‘Ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard Harmony’, a recording rang out over the loudspeaker. ‘Harmony’ is the literal translation of Hexie Hao, which is what the Chinese call their high-speed trains. I couldn’t argue with this as I leaned back in a soft seat, stretched out my legs, and got ready to begin a short journey that would take me 165 km from Shanghai to Changzhou in under an hour. Almost silently, the train began rolling away from the platform on the minute of its scheduled departure time, and I was shot down the spine of what is quickly becoming the Yangtze River Delta super-megacity.

The master plan is to connect Shanghai with Nanjing in the west and Taizhou, Zhejiang in the south, tying up all of the sixteen budding cities of the Yangtze River Delta into a singular urban colossus of more than 80 million people. Many of the wealthiest cities in China are accounted for within this urban mass. In terms of per capita GDP, Suzhou, Wuxi and Changzhou routinely top China’s richest cities charts; Nanjing and Hangzhou are economic powerhouses; and Shanghai is the undisputed financial capital of the entire country. This is the most economically vibrant area of China; though it covers just 1 per cent of the country’s urban area and contains only 6 per cent of its population, it produces 20 per cent of the country’s GDP.

The nerve system of this megacity is the high-speed rail lines that run through its centre, connecting the various urban districts into a single, interconnected, pulsating megalopolis. Over 120 pairs of high-speed trains run the line between Shanghai and Nanjing each day, departing every 5–15 minutes. The G class train can cover the 300 km distance between these two cities in a mere hour and a half. To travel the same distance by car takes more than twice as long in good traffic. For scale, the average one-way commute of a Shanghai resident is 47 minutes, and this is without even leaving the city proper. Now residents can easily live in another city along the line and commute to Shanghai for work or vice versa. The speed of these passenger trains along with their frequent departures enables the population of this region to spread out, and seek homes and opportunity throughout the region. For example, someone could live in the lower-cost cities such as Wuxi, Suzhou or Changzhou and commute to Shanghai in the same amount of time it takes for the average Shanghainese to get to work. When a person can wake up in Shanghai, attend a meeting in Nanjing, and be back by lunchtime, these high-speed trains are making the mega-region dream a reality.

The train didn’t even get up to top speed before slowing down for its first stop at Kunshan. There was no visible gap between Shanghai’s industrial suburbs and this factory town. Large, cube-like manufacturing plants abutted large cube-like manufacturing plants until the loudspeaker of the train informed me that we were someplace else.

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