Wade Shepard grew up around ghost cities in Rust Belt, USA, so he’s reluctant to call China’s newly constructed, yet-to-be-populated urban developments “ghost cities”, but he does so for brevity’s sake. After years of traveling to and writing about China’s ghost cities on his website Vagabond Journey, he’s finally published a book on the subject. As a phenomenon with lots of hype but lacking in critical analysis, Shepard’s mission is to desensationalize and rationalize ghost cities’ existence in the context of China’s massive push for urbanization. His research has led him to see the purpose of urbanization in China, and even the basic function of cities and residences, in a different light.

When Shepard came to the Bookworm several months ago to talk about his new book, Ghost Cities of China (which is out now and available here) I got the chance to sit down with him and hear stories about biking into new cities, sleeping in tents in the middle of massive metropoles, and being part of a new generation of China writers.

Read our discussion below, which was edited for length and clarity.

NOTE: This is part 1 of a two-part interview. Part 2 will come out next week.  Listen to a clip of the interview here.

CL: What angle are you coming at the ghost cities story from, and how does it differ from other ghost cities coverage?

The international media has established this narrative that these cities are being built to boost GDP, right, that there’s nobody there, there are a lot of empty apartments. And I was kind of disappointed, I thought that when the Chinese media started looking into this that we’d get something more added to the dialogue.

I guess where other coverage differs from what I’m doing is that I spent about two and a half years actually in these places actually talking to the people who were building them, the people who were moving into them, people who were buying property. I guess when you’re a journalist you have two approaches right: you can choose to sensationalize this story, and a story about cities with no people in them, that’s inherently sensational. Or you can choose to rationalize something, to really go in and break this story down and try to find out what’s really happening. And I tried to do the latter.



What was your first exposure to the existence of ghost cities, and how did your understanding of them evolve from there?

The first time I ended up in a ghost city – or I should say a new urban development that had yet to be populated in China – was actually about five years before I really started this project. It was in 2006, I was a student in Zheda and I was working on a project about Chinese hermits, or the “modern hermit tradition.” I went out to Tiantai in Zhejiang Province which is in this area – it’s where Han Shan, the famous Tang Dynasty poet had his hermitage – and I went out there and visited Han Shan’s hermitage and I looked for modern hermits, people living in the mountains and whatever. And it was an interesting trip.

What was really of significance about it was when I arrived in Tiantai I made a wrong turn out of the bus station: I could have went right and into the old city where there’s people, but I went left. Oftentimes they build these new bus and train stations out in the new areas – like if you look at a map of China’s high speed rail system, where the stations are often directly correspond to where a new city or a big new development is going to be. There is very much a master plan and there’s this push to fulfill the master plan that sometimes comes off as slapdash to observers.

Anyways, I walk into this completely new area with shops and apartments, but there was nobody living there. I mean it was completely empty.