Underground world hints at China's coming crisis. China's new world order. By all appearances, Chinese President Hu Jintao's visit to Washington last week changed little in the lopsided American-Chinese relationship.
What we have is a system that methodically transfers American jobs, technology and financial power to China in return for only modest Chinese support for important U.S. geopolitical goals: the suppression of Iran's and North Korea's nuclear weapons programs. American officials act as though there's not much they can do to change this. It's true that the United States and China have huge common interests in peace and prosperity. Two-way trade (now about $500 billion annually) can provide low-cost consumer goods to Americans and foodstuffs and advanced manufactured products to the Chinese.
But China's and America's goals differ radically. Naturally, the United States opposes this sort of system, but that's where we're headed. Start with distorted trade. With details changed, similar stories apply to many industries. Finally, there's finance. Ghost towns of China: Satellite images show cities lying completely deserted. By Daily Mail Reporter Updated: 10:53 GMT, 18 December 2010 These amazing satellite images show sprawling cities built in remote parts of China that have been left completely abandoned, sometimes years after their construction.
Elaborate public buildings and open spaces are completely unused, with the exception of a few government vehicles near communist authority offices. Some estimates put the number of empty homes at as many as 64 million, with up to 20 new cities being built every year in the country's vast swathes of free land. The photographs have emerged as a Chinese government think tank warns that the country's real estate bubble is getting worse, with property prices in major cities overvalued by as much as 70 per cent.
Ghost city: Kangbashi was meant to be the urban centre for wealthy coal-mining community Ordos and home to its one million workers, but its roads are eerily empty and the houses stand vacant Half of Erenhot is empty. A giant empty hotel sits in the city of Erenhot. JOHN HUMPHRYS on China: A nation on the edge of superpower or anarchy. By John HumphrysUPDATED: 13:21 GMT, 6 November 2010 The chanting, when it began, sounded angry.
I was in my hotel room in Beijing trying to put together a report on political repression for the Today programme and this sounded as if it might be just what I needed. I had been in China for more than a week. Everywhere I went people had been telling me that things had changed so much since I first started reporting from here more than 30 years ago that I would scarcely recognise the place.