[adinobro]

Except lots of the original ghost cities are now full.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2016/04/23/chinas-l...

The probably is that a journalist that doesn't understand how China works stumbled onto a construction zone and didn't understand what they saw. Chinese build housing for half a million people at once fairly regularly. I've gone past multiple constructions sites like this.

They also build whole cities (which the ghost cities story was about) and they fill up. A bunch of people pre-buy and once they get a minimum buy-in they start construction. Once the city is mostly finished it still takes a while for everything else to be done inside BUT in China, they don't fence of construction sites at this stage while in developed countries they do. You can just walk in and look around. There are no squatters laws so people cannot just take your property and there are fewer liability issues so they don't really care.

[cannonedhamster]

Uh... Did you read the article you cited? It literally said the area is still empty they just stopped including it as part of the city and only included the inhabited part, though that part was already full of people before those buildings went up. It's more of a quirk in how cities are defined as administrative regions instead of distinct urban areas. The buildings are still empty though. Like most things in China it's lots of talk and flash, little real magic behind the show.