One other difference – while shopping malls in the US have been struggling remain open as retailers either fail or decide to move to another location (sometimes to the web), many new malls in China never had the retailers to begin with. One mall, called the South China Mall (also known as the Great Mall of China), was supposed to be the biggest retail mall in the world, with over 1500 shops under one roof. Instead it sits virtually empty, with few operating shops and even fewer customers.
To see how bad it is, an Australian news crew visited one of the new cities. Thousands of apartments sit empty, as do many of the retails shops.
Billions of dollars spent on ghost cities where very few live. This is what happens when the government decides what the demand will be rather than letting the private sector figure it out and build only what they can sell.