I saw a documentary once about two ghost cities, the documentary was 6 years old and those cites were almost with 0 resident, I saw on comment Chinese people saying that those cities are full now. It's just China being two steps forward.
I think I saw the same documentary. They are only ghost cities for so long. Then the government "seeds" the city by moving some public sector offices there (which in China could mean 100,000+ workers). That alone is enough to kick start the city into life.
The thing is that not like those cities are cheap to get an apartment in... China is more like still having a resident problem than a first world problem of ghost cities.
This is exactly why the Baidu study is important. China is so big and data quality so poor that you can create your own version of ghost city narrative ("big crash" or "people moving in no worries" etc.) by selecting 10 cities. Even looking at things at a gross level ("cement/steel consumed") can only hint at the massive over-investment in property. Even the govt. is probably not sure.
Aren't the "ghost cities" really investment properties for wealthier Chinese living in the cities? I seem to remember reading that there's a lack of diverse investment opportunities, so many invest in condos that they'll never use/inhabit.
Maybe this is the precursor to the next step of "seeding"?
Partly, but it is primarily to bring those living in rural areas into an urban context as a mechanism for modernizing the economy.
Right now, under the hukou system (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hukou_system), you can't just move anywhere you want. What ends up happening is those living in rural areas illegally move to cities like Beijing/Shanghai/Shenzhen for work, but can't get their children educated or get healthcare. This is a way to prevent mass migration to the first-tier cities.
Most Chinese are fairly nationalistic. They're not going to complain about this to a foreign documentarian, especially if there's political reprisal for criticizing the one-party regime that runs everything.
This is why stuff like this is important. We get a view behind the propaganda veil. The narrative of "See, we planned ahead all is good," is questionable especially considering their recent stock market and economic woes.
I would treat anything from Baidu with a grain of salt, mainly Baidu is not the most technical competent company, even among Chinese companies. There are other researches on ghost cities using methods like at night counting the number of units with lights on and do this for consequtive n nights, or measure the total power consumption over a period of time.
What makes you say Baidu is not technically competent? Andrew Ng's work alone seems to be on the cutting edge of machine learning and voice/image recognition.
While Andrew Ng's work gets a lot of press, there appears to be other interesting work coming out of Baidu in O2O, search, wiki, image,video, self driving cars etc.
They also appear to be a well run business as evidenced by rapid revenue and earnings growth for over a decade.
I'm biased as a BIDU shareholder, but that is precisely why I'm interested in your critism.
Huh? The Chinese govt is known for not allowing foreign web companies lots of freedom to compete but there are certainly domestic search engines to compete with. Baidu has about 71% share of the search market in China.
Simple. Did you actually use Baidu? I do, on a regular basis.
Let me elaborate
Andrew Ng no doubt is a famous researcher, but I am talking about a common user's experience, and no, I don't see anything that reminds of machine learning while using Baidu services.
To give you an example, search for 'Windows 7' in Baidu.
Here is the screen capture of the results I got (http://imgur.com/nNBSo3g), basically there is no mention of Microsoft's site. I do see the first is the link for people download this software for free. Ok, where is the machine learning? There could be a few reasons explaining this behavior, but I don't wish to go into those. To say the least: if it is not technical issue, it is ethical. Both are very important to shareholders.
As a control, I searched for the same on Google, and the first 2 results are from wikipedia, while the rest are from microsoft.com, mixed with news results from news sites, which are very to the point.
Another example, Baidu's SDK has opened up security holes up to 100 million Android devices (http://www.engadget.com/2015/11/02/bunk-baidu-sdk-puts-backd...), and unfortunately, this isn't the first incident in 2015. As far as I can recall, there are at least 3-4 similar issues, unintentionally or intentionally caused by technical incompetency.
Disclosure: I worked in China for some time and now still got business connection with it. I am not an armchair warrior to bash China.
It seems unfair to jump from "it's a shoddy product" and "they introduced a security hole" to "they're not technically competent."
A lot of American and European companies have done, and consistently do, the same things. It seems like there's some hypercriticism due to underlying suspicions of intentionality – however well-founded those suspicions may be.
I would like to just say that Quarz is SUCH A GREAT new journalism portal. It seems to strike a solid balance of covering major global developments by touching on a linchpin issue and describing that aspect thoroughly and in an easy to understand manner.
I'll dispute one data point on that map: Xiaoshan, just across the Qiantang river from Hangzhou. I lived there from 2009-2010. When I moved there it had recently been renamed/rezoned into Xiaoshan District of Hangzhou city. So technically, Xiaoshan is not a city anymore. Also, despite an obvious wealth gap between new developments and "older" parts of southern Xiaoshan, the place was still _teeming_ with people as Chinese cities do. Xiaoshan had its own local and high-speed rail stations, too.
Let's paint a brief picture of this place for your procrastination pleasure ;) I’m excerpting a couple things from my journal, and this is the tip of the iceberg of what I experienced there.
What Xiaoshan is not: miles of high rises with no one there like other “ghost cities”. It is instead an old farming "city" with a new high-rises and pavement slowly taking over from the north. Central Xiaoshan is where the meld is happening. On the outskirts of Xiaoshan district, pockets of new developments and factories pepper farmlands like little islands. Joining them together was a network of new, large expressways with huge road-side billboards boasting the new “zhejiang high technology hub”. As one cabbie explained to me about 10 months into my stay, “15 years ago this entire place was rice fields”. He struggled to adapt to modern life so quickly, and knew he had to for his family. Another cabbie having a harder time adjusting actually called me a “white monster” and pleaded I don’t any marry locals or else I'll bring bad luck to their families.
The only time Xiaoshan felt "ghost" was on these outskirts of these “islands" where developments abruptly ended and turned into farmland that was scheduled to be converted soon. Roads suddenly disappeared. Storefronts and commercial buildings vanished. High rises gave way to farms and shanty towns that housed pockets of people living in extraordinarily poor conditions compared to what was half a mile away. People without reliable tap water and electricity, while I lived in a new high rise less than 2 miles away.
My old bosses thought it would be cheeky to house me in a new apartment building named after a famous US State. This building was actually a de-facto high-end local brothel on the edge of the central Xiaoshan “island”. Late night this place was a Chinese version of Animal House. I'll leave the details out here, but this building was lawless. Literally - the police handled _nothing_ that happened there and were probably paid to stay away.
The apartment building was also attached to a mega-mall that was mostly empty all the time. There was a spanking new digital projection movie theater with 500 seats, a huge KTV, a few struggling restaurants, every luxury brand store you can think of, and typical department store wares. Movie nights were interesting. The theater attendance was so low, I’d often be the only person in a theater with a 70 foot screen all to myself. Sometimes the staff would hang with me to watch movies b/c they had jack else to do. Foreign movies were censored in weird ways: I distinctly remember how the audio in Iron Man 2 would always mute the word "Russia". Every time Ivan Vanko's spoke in Russian, the Chinese subtitles would say he’s speaking Afghani - no mentioning of Russia/Russian allowed, apparently! I couldn’t read fast enough to know if the dialogue was translated correctly, though.
Among the “islands" between Xiaoshan and the river also lay fabric and electronics factories, and compounds for communities of the very wealthy. One of the best private schools in all of Zhejiang sat in the middle of a high rise neighbourhood of shiny, expensive new buildings. 15 minutes away, Cisco had a two tower office complex seemingly in the middle of nowhere full of people who lived nearby. Hop on the freeway, drive past Alibaba HQ (which employs thousands), take the bridge across the river, and you're droppe...
Nice writing, and my 'knowledge' about the state of affairs is way less (near zero), but for me, you do not refute that it is a ghost town now. At the speed that China builds 2009-2010 is ages ago. They may have filled the space between those islands of activity with still empty buildings.
The point was to illustrate the areas I saw were not large blocks of empty buildings with no one in them for miles around. Surely the area has changed a lot since I was last there.
Seems as though that's what's happening. I just hopped on Baidu street view and found a couple new spots about 1km away from my old place. Wtf are all _these_ buildings:
http://j.map.baidu.com/1tSRD (looking east in this spot points you towards central Xiaoshan where there are are indeed people. West, however, is _all_ new to me)
The clone-stamped buildings look totally surreal to me. I know why they do it and it makes sense, but the overwhelming majority of Western cities, which grow organically over many decades/centuries, never end up with repeated buildings like that, so it's very jarring to see.
Hey, isn't there a refugee Crysis in Europe? How about filling up these ghost towns with actual people in dire need of shelter and other basic necessities?
China also has (hundreds of millions) of incredibly poor people who would like to live in one of these ghost cities. The problem is that all of these giant empty buildings cost money to build and the investors still want to get their money back.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 87.5 ms ] threadMaybe this is the precursor to the next step of "seeding"?
Right now, under the hukou system (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hukou_system), you can't just move anywhere you want. What ends up happening is those living in rural areas illegally move to cities like Beijing/Shanghai/Shenzhen for work, but can't get their children educated or get healthcare. This is a way to prevent mass migration to the first-tier cities.
This is why stuff like this is important. We get a view behind the propaganda veil. The narrative of "See, we planned ahead all is good," is questionable especially considering their recent stock market and economic woes.
It's more like TV channels and newspaper trying to give you news that blew your mind, 2010s marketing = WTF effect.
While Andrew Ng's work gets a lot of press, there appears to be other interesting work coming out of Baidu in O2O, search, wiki, image,video, self driving cars etc.
They also appear to be a well run business as evidenced by rapid revenue and earnings growth for over a decade.
I'm biased as a BIDU shareholder, but that is precisely why I'm interested in your critism.
Let me elaborate
Andrew Ng no doubt is a famous researcher, but I am talking about a common user's experience, and no, I don't see anything that reminds of machine learning while using Baidu services.
To give you an example, search for 'Windows 7' in Baidu.
Here is the screen capture of the results I got (http://imgur.com/nNBSo3g), basically there is no mention of Microsoft's site. I do see the first is the link for people download this software for free. Ok, where is the machine learning? There could be a few reasons explaining this behavior, but I don't wish to go into those. To say the least: if it is not technical issue, it is ethical. Both are very important to shareholders.
As a control, I searched for the same on Google, and the first 2 results are from wikipedia, while the rest are from microsoft.com, mixed with news results from news sites, which are very to the point.
Another example, Baidu's SDK has opened up security holes up to 100 million Android devices (http://www.engadget.com/2015/11/02/bunk-baidu-sdk-puts-backd...), and unfortunately, this isn't the first incident in 2015. As far as I can recall, there are at least 3-4 similar issues, unintentionally or intentionally caused by technical incompetency.
Disclosure: I worked in China for some time and now still got business connection with it. I am not an armchair warrior to bash China.
"China's replacement for Windows is an XP ripoff"
http://www.theverge.com/2015/9/25/9396769/china-NeoKylin-ope...
A lot of American and European companies have done, and consistently do, the same things. It seems like there's some hypercriticism due to underlying suspicions of intentionality – however well-founded those suspicions may be.
To turn the question around: what makes you think they are technical competent? Can you provide 2 examples instead?
2. I searched for "cats" on Baidu. I got... the musical, a pop group... okay, maybe you're right.
Let's paint a brief picture of this place for your procrastination pleasure ;) I’m excerpting a couple things from my journal, and this is the tip of the iceberg of what I experienced there.
What Xiaoshan is not: miles of high rises with no one there like other “ghost cities”. It is instead an old farming "city" with a new high-rises and pavement slowly taking over from the north. Central Xiaoshan is where the meld is happening. On the outskirts of Xiaoshan district, pockets of new developments and factories pepper farmlands like little islands. Joining them together was a network of new, large expressways with huge road-side billboards boasting the new “zhejiang high technology hub”. As one cabbie explained to me about 10 months into my stay, “15 years ago this entire place was rice fields”. He struggled to adapt to modern life so quickly, and knew he had to for his family. Another cabbie having a harder time adjusting actually called me a “white monster” and pleaded I don’t any marry locals or else I'll bring bad luck to their families.
The only time Xiaoshan felt "ghost" was on these outskirts of these “islands" where developments abruptly ended and turned into farmland that was scheduled to be converted soon. Roads suddenly disappeared. Storefronts and commercial buildings vanished. High rises gave way to farms and shanty towns that housed pockets of people living in extraordinarily poor conditions compared to what was half a mile away. People without reliable tap water and electricity, while I lived in a new high rise less than 2 miles away.
My old bosses thought it would be cheeky to house me in a new apartment building named after a famous US State. This building was actually a de-facto high-end local brothel on the edge of the central Xiaoshan “island”. Late night this place was a Chinese version of Animal House. I'll leave the details out here, but this building was lawless. Literally - the police handled _nothing_ that happened there and were probably paid to stay away.
The apartment building was also attached to a mega-mall that was mostly empty all the time. There was a spanking new digital projection movie theater with 500 seats, a huge KTV, a few struggling restaurants, every luxury brand store you can think of, and typical department store wares. Movie nights were interesting. The theater attendance was so low, I’d often be the only person in a theater with a 70 foot screen all to myself. Sometimes the staff would hang with me to watch movies b/c they had jack else to do. Foreign movies were censored in weird ways: I distinctly remember how the audio in Iron Man 2 would always mute the word "Russia". Every time Ivan Vanko's spoke in Russian, the Chinese subtitles would say he’s speaking Afghani - no mentioning of Russia/Russian allowed, apparently! I couldn’t read fast enough to know if the dialogue was translated correctly, though.
Among the “islands" between Xiaoshan and the river also lay fabric and electronics factories, and compounds for communities of the very wealthy. One of the best private schools in all of Zhejiang sat in the middle of a high rise neighbourhood of shiny, expensive new buildings. 15 minutes away, Cisco had a two tower office complex seemingly in the middle of nowhere full of people who lived nearby. Hop on the freeway, drive past Alibaba HQ (which employs thousands), take the bridge across the river, and you're droppe...
http://j.map.baidu.com/EPRRD
http://j.map.baidu.com/1tSRD (looking east in this spot points you towards central Xiaoshan where there are are indeed people. West, however, is _all_ new to me)