China’s Ghost Cities and the Bureaucratic Politics of Urban Growth: Evidence from Lingang New City

Abstract:

This thesis offers a political characterization of one of the most curious byproducts of China’s rapid urbanization—the proliferation of vast, modern, but sparsely inhabited “ghost cities,” new districts built by municipal governments which then lie empty. Previous area studies scholars have hypothesized that ghost cities result when ambitious local officials seek to raise revenue or increase their promotion odds through urban development. However, evidence from Lingang New City, a ghost district in the exurbs of Shanghai, suggests a more nuanced explanation rooted in bureaucratic politics and institutional design. Complementing elite interviews and textual analysis to provide a complete process-tracing, this thesis argues that Lingang’s development is best understood as the product of a bureaucratic structure specifically created to achieve a narrow, preordained vision for the district’s development. Operating with a constrained mandate, multiple levels of government used adaptive policy making to achieve a planning outcome that, rational or not, had been set in stone from the beginning. Though still in progress, later sections of this thesis will aim to extend this argument to other cases, explaining new district development in China as a product of bureaucratic path dependency rather than official self-interest.