Across China: Sport and tech give spirit to Chinese ghost town

Cruising in his car down an abandoned street in Kangbashi town, tourist Zheng Yi recalls gaping at the modern design of the apartments.

From the passenger seat, his friend suggested he buy an apartment in the young town in north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, where the price is nearly half that of Ordos city, just 23 kilometers down the road. Kangbashi is a satellite town of Ordos.

"Life is comfortable, but too dull here," Zhang replied, shrugging off the suggestion.

The stigma facing Kangbashi, which was labelled a Chinese "ghost town" in international press, has been tough to shake.

A futuristic town built with coal money in 2011, Kangbashi has long been the epitome of heedless city construction and the resulting housing bubble.

Four years have passed since it first earned the blighted label and the town remains busy fighting for its image.

Hoping to do for the town what the 2008 Beijing Olympics did for the country, Kangbashi is hosting this year's National Traditional Games of Ethnic Minorities, which occurs once every 4 years, between August 9th and 17th.

"We made great efforts to become a host for the games. It is a great opportunity for Kangbashi to develop tourism and minority culture," Li Jing, a staff with the Kangbashi publicity office, told Xinhua.

Events, which include dragon boat races and wrestling, are mainly for show rather than competition, so they are not as high profile as other sporting events. However, local authorities hope it will greatly boost the city's tourism.

A 2.5 billion-yuan sports center with 60,000 seats covering 338,000 square meters was recently finished in Kangbashi and will serve as the main stadium for the games.

Several of the city's numerous empty apartments have been turned into dorms for athletes, Li said. In the future, they will be made into apartments for tourists.

The games will bring more than 6,000 competitors and guarantee quality air time on major television stations, which will help promote the city's image, he added.

The games came as a savior to Kangbashi, which hopes to become a popular tourist destination.

"Tourism is the pillar industry for Kangbashi. We will further improve services to attract more tourists," said Shi Yanjie, Party secretary of Kangbashi in an interview with a local newspaper in January.

In the first six months of this year, more than 235,800 tourists visited Kangbashi, up 58.7 percent from last year. They spent 330 million yuan, up 181.7 percent year on year.

"The city has been built, now we have to change our work from the surface to the inside and make it good place to live," Shi said.

Kangbashi currently has a population of 100,000, with a growing number of young people attracted by the low price of housing. An apartment in Kangbashi costs around 4,000 yuan (654 USD) per square meter, compared with 7,000 yuan in Ordos.

A new shopping center will be built in downtown Kangbashi, with a 3D photo exhibition and state-of-the-art theaters to attract the young.

For Kangbashi and Ordos, however, image is not the only worry.

In Ordos, coal mining used to make up 70 percent of the city's GDP, but now coal mines have difficulty paying wages and fallout from the property bubble left most of the area's "newly rich" in heavy debt.

Xiao Xiaohong, an Ordos native in her 40s, recalled the "good old days" when coal prices soared and they reaped in money.

"Those years were crazy. It was just me and a couple of friends, idling away time and cash. I went shopping and visited an apartment in Beijing. Without a single moment of hesitation, I bought it right away, with cash," she said.

"Now after the debt crisis and housing bubble, we've fallen on our bottom, almost busted."

Things have yet to recover, according to Bai Yugang, the city secretary of the Communist Party of China.

"Honestly, our hard times are not over yet," he said in an interview with Xinhua.

"The easy money from dig-and-sell is over, now we are back to more stable and reasonable development. Ordos will not eat and sleep on coals. It must diversify and pursue other industries. This is a life-or-death issue."

In the first quarter this year, more than 80 percent of the city' s money, roughly 8.22 billion yuan, was been put into non-coal industries, up 12.7 percent from the previous year.

A 1.4-billion-yuan big data center was completed in Ordos this July.

"We plan to invite 200 computer and Internet companies to the center," Bai said.

Meanwhile, a 22-billion-yuan factory was constructed to make screens for smartphones.

"These technological industries are expanding in size and injecting life into the local economy," Bai said. Endi