Across China, whole new cities have been built, with tower blocks, wide roads and shopping centres, and then left largely empty. This film visits some of those places, where apartment windows stay dark at night and streets are quiet by day. The emptiness is striking, because the buildings themselves look finished and modern. They were built for people who had not yet arrived, in the hope that jobs and families would follow the construction.
The video explains how this happened, through a property market in which local governments sell land, developers borrow to build, and buyers purchase flats as investments rather than as homes to live in. For years that system produced rapid growth, new districts and rising prices. It also produced a surplus of homes that many ordinary people could not afford, in cities far from the jobs they needed, and the film shows the result in empty squares, unfinished shops and silent housing estates.
For understanding socialism, empty cities are a powerful image. A state that planned its economy and directed its banks found that planning could create buildings faster than it could create communities. The film does not argue that the cities will stay empty for ever, but it asks what growth is for, if it leaves homes without people and people without affordable homes, and what that mismatch says about the way China’s economy has been run.