中国欧式小镇成“鬼城”_BEC初级作文

中国欧式小镇成“鬼城”

In the case of Anting, the problem seems to be more of an absence of the latter. A pleasant conurbation of ponds, green space, and wide boulevards, there is nothing about Anting that wouldn’t necessarily appeal to Chinese buyers—a Shanghai city planner praised the concept as aesthetic and “well thought through”—but “the project failed because … the district is cut off and surrounded by industrial districts and wasteland.” It was like a “foreign body,” the city planner told Der Spiegel.

To China’s more bearish observers, vacant cities are prima facie evidence of the country’s overcapacity problem, with Ordos, a “ghost town” in Inner Mongolia, being the most famous example. But some economists reject this narrow interpretation.

“It’s possible the ‘ghost town’ problem is exaggerated. China is a big country; different local governments have different governing styles and their leaders have different working abilities,” says Pan Yingli. “Local governments borrow a lot of money [to build these towns] but [these towns don’t create] the industries or population to produce enough fiscal income to pay them off.These debts become bad loans and add to the risks for the banks. And the banks’ solution to this is to extend maturities—in other words, to lend them more money to pay off their old debts.”

Stevenson-Yang attributes the faux-architecture phenomenon partly to “a lack of commercial drivers behind development … planners just pluck ideas from magazines.” It’s a description that Spring Legend’s Liu would probably dispute. The decision to build Spring Legend in its unique style was carefully considered, he says, rather than a knee-jerk instinct to copy other successful copycats.