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Few areas of China reflect the country’s decades-long economic transformation more vividly than its cities. Rapid development has turned villages into dense urban landscapes and already sizeable metro areas into some of the world’s largest population centres. As the rate of urbanisation slows and the country transitions into a new economic era, we explore how select Chinese cities are navigating the change. Read the rest of our series here. In a remote corner of China’s southwestern Guizhou province, hulking replicas of ancient Chinese city walls, Beijing’s Forbidden City and London’s Big Ben rise from the jagged karst landscape. The town feels almost surreal: a blend of ruin and grandeur that defies logic. Half-built resorts and deserted monuments dot the skyline. Rows of crumbling storefronts and semi-demolished buildings stand like open wounds along the dusty main road. Until recently, this community of just over 350,000 people nestled in the Guizhou mountains was largely unknown in China. But it is now famous across the country as a cautionary tale: a story of reckless investment on an epic scale. In the 2010s, Dushan county – the area that administers the town – launched a vast construction spree as the impoverished region tried to transform itself into a culture and tourism hub. Grandiose hotels, shopping malls, pavilions, apartment complexes and even a sprawling university hub all sprang up within just a few years. But the boom was built on debt – masses of debt. By 2018, the county owed around 40 billion yuan (US$5.6 billion), a staggering sum for a region whose annual fiscal revenues barely reached 1 billion yuan. The money ran out soon after, leaving the landscape littered with decaying, abandoned vanity projects. Locals in Dushan are still dealing with the fallout years later. The county government remains weighed down by debt repayments. Many of the ambitious projects never opened. Income levels remain low: urban residents had just over 42,500 yuan of annual disposable income on average in 2024, while rural residents had less than 17,500 yuan. Dushan is far from an isolated case. During the past decade, small towns across China were doing the same thing: chasing prosperity through spectacular investment projects, driven by land sales, cheap capital and short-term political ambition. But as Beijing strives to clean up the mess left behind – bringing local debts under control and shifting the economy onto a more sustainable growth model – Dushan has been held up as an example: a symbol of everything that went wrong during the hot-money era. The town’s notoriety centres around its most famous landmark: the Shuisi Tower. Rising almost 100 metres high, the massive structure was designed to put Dushan on the map by breaking new architectural ground and celebrating the region’s diverse ethnic heritage. Built entirely of wood and held together by mortise-and-tenon joints – a traditional joining system developed in ancient China – the tower claimed to break several world records when it was constructed in the mid-2010s, including largest Shui-style building and tallest glazed-tile building. But the project soon went off the rails. By 2020, work on the tower had ground to a halt, after costs reportedly ballooned to over 250 million yuan. The central government slammed the project as “vain and wasteful” – putting Dushan on the map for the wrong reasons – and the building was left an empty shell for years. Other local projects suffered a similar fate. The county also spent over 5.6 billion yuan on Pangu Manor, a huge commercial complex built in the shape of a giant altar. Today, the site is almost deserted: only a handful of shops inside are still open, while long grass shoots up from the stairways. Not far away sits Dushan University Town, a 2 billion yuan project originally designed to house 10 universities and up to 100,000 students. Its current occupants? A handful of local schools, including a teachers’ college and a vocational school. “Dushan’s development went wrong from the start – a small mountain town like this could never sustain such grand projects,” said Huang Jingnan, a professor of urban design at Wuhan University who has been a regular visitor to Dushan since 1999. “The scale of construction was far beyond what it could bear and the choice of industries was misguided,” he added. “In the end, it’s a waste of public resources – so much money poured in with no real return. Anyone with some sense can see that.” What happened wasn’t normal. The mistakes were severe, even unforgivable Huang Jingnan, professor How did such a catastrophic failure occur? In Dushan, discussions will inevitably start with former party secretary Pan Zhili, who was airdropped into the county in 2010. Aged 45 at the time he arrived, Pan was a man in a hurry. He had been sent from the eastern Jiangsu province – one of China’s wealthiest regions – as part of an initiative designed to speed up the development of lower-income areas by bringing in fresh talent from prosperous coastal cities. If he wanted to advance his career, Pan needed to deliver big, tangible results fast. So, he turned to a classic policy playbook: launching infrastructure and real estate projects that would quickly drive up local economic growth and grab attention. The policies should have taken into account Dushan’s sparse population, lack of resources and weak fiscal capacity, said Chen Naijia, a researcher at the independent Chinese think tank Anbound. But in the early 2010s, local Chinese officials had an incentive to prioritise short-term growth over long-term sustainability. With officials typically staying in each place for only a few years and assessed primarily based on local gross domestic product (GDP) figures during their time in office, they were “motivated to achieve visible results within their short tenure”, Chen explained. Major construction projects were a simple way to achieve just that. Pan was far from alone in pursuing this approach: poor counties across Guizhou are littered with boondoggles and unfinished buildings. Just over 100 miles away, Jianhe county built a statue of a Miao goddess taller than the Statue of Liberty in New York City at a cost of more than 86 million yuan. “This combination of ‘land-driven growth’ and high debt leverage was typical during China’s period of rapid economic expansion,” Chen said. Normally, such major projects require careful review before being approved. But in practice, local party secretaries often held absolute authority in small counties like Dushan and could operate with few restraints, experts said. According to domestic media reports, Pan’s management style was authoritarian. Many projects were greenlighted as soon as he gave the nod, often bypassing normal design, budgeting and auditing procedures. During his eight years in Dushan, nearly 1,900 hectares of land was illegally occupied and over 1 billion yuan of state assets were lost. Twenty-six officials in the county were later disciplined for violations related to illegal land use, a newspaper under China’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection reported. “This ultimately reflects gaps in top-level institutional design and weak higher-level supervision,” Chen said. In April 2020, Pan was sentenced to 12 years in prison for multiple offences, including corruption and abuse of power. The construction boom did provide a temporary boost to Dushan’s economy, local residents recalled. Construction crews flocked to the county to build railroads, bridges, industrial parks and towers, while restaurants, hotels and other businesses sprang up to serve them. Yang Shenglong, a local taxi driver, said he used to pull in 1,000 yuan to 2,000 yuan per day during the good times. Now, he is lucky to make 200 yuan. “Passenger traffic was huge,” Yang said. “You could even make money just selling vegetables back then.” The county, however, is still paying the price for the spending spree over half a decade later. Walking around the town, signs of dysfunction are clearly visible. A new road, completed last year, remains officially unopened because the government has yet to pay the construction workers, according to local taxi drivers who still drive through it, carefully steering around the roadblocks. At night, some neighborhoods sink into darkness, as the county cannot afford to keep the streetlights shining. “In simple terms, what happened wasn’t normal,” Huang said. “There’s no shortcut to fixing this. The mistakes were severe, even unforgivable.” The county is doing its best to move forward. Earlier this year, a hotel finally opened on the site of the Shuisi Tower, after the building was overhauled and redecorated – the original wooden exterior covered over with a white-and-blue design. Local tourism is showing signs of progress, with more than 6 million visitors travelling to the county last year, a 25.5 per cent year-on-year increase, according to official data. Yet, Dushan still has outstanding debts of more than 20 billion yuan, according to the local government. Last year, analysts warned the region faced a crippling burden and that Beijing might need to provide greater financial relief to help it get out of trouble. Beijing, for its part, is focused on shifting the economy onto a new growth model that prioritises sustainability over speed, to prevent similar debt crises from erupting in the future. Dushan’s true value lies not in grandiose landmarks or architectural spectacles, but in its authentic cultural roots Chen Naijia, researcher In August, the central government unveiled a new urban development blueprint that explicitly calls for a pivot from rapid expansion to a focus on quality and efficiency, citing the need to provide households with better services. Last year, the Communist Party also revised its disciplinary regulations to introduce stricter punishments for officials who pursue “vanity projects” that violate the principles of high-quality development – elevating such acts from mere misconduct to breaches of political discipline. For Huang, a slower, more grounded approach makes sense. The lives of his wife’s relatives, who had lived in Dushan for decades, had mostly improved thanks to steady urbanisation efforts – moving from farms to towns, opening small shops, joining government offices and teaching at local schools, he said. “Now it’s about returning to a sense of normalcy – slowing down the pace of development and improving quality,” Huang said. “We can’t rely on the old model of high input and low output.” Anbound’s Chen echoed this view. Dushan actually had a lot to offer, with beautiful scenery and vibrant, diverse cultural heritage, he suggested. “Dushan’s true value lies not in grandiose landmarks or architectural spectacles, but in its authentic cultural roots,” he said. “The key is to protect and showcase the region’s genuine traditions and local life.”
