Business life stirring in those 'ghost' cities

Ordos Kangbashi, built in the desert some 23 kilometers outside Ordos, the Inner Mongolia autonomous region, was itself the subject of media attention. One report by Al Jazeera in 2009 claimed that despite its giant skyscrapers and wide streets "nobody lived there".

Other areas that have attracted attention are Chenggong, a new district of Kunming in Yunnan; Dantu, part of Zhenjiang in Jiangsu; the new area of Linyi in Shandong; and the new urban area of Xinyang, which like Zhengdong, is in Henan.

Shepard believes even when occupancy rates in these areas were relatively low, they were rarely deserted as has been claimed.

"If you have a district of hundreds of 30-story apartment blocks and they are 50 percent empty, that is still a lot of people living in the area," he said.

Regardless of whether the scale and pace of China's urban development has been set at the right level, the world's second-largest economy has shown it has the ability to deliver such huge projects in a short space of time.

Much of the credit for that has to go to its planning system, which is renowned for being decisive and can anticipate needs many years ahead.

In many other countries, where there are often lengthy planning enquiries, urban development often lags well behind demand.

The United Kingdom, for example, has not built a new town or city since Milton Keynes in 1967 and is suffering a major housing shortage. Many other European countries have similar problems.

"No other country can just clear 65 square kilometers of land, move everybody out and build a new city," added Shepard.

"The UK has an inadequate supply of affordable housing so it needs to change. That is not to say that China does not have issues. Through urbanization it has created this mass human migration, and to some extent it has to build these additional cities to cope with demand."

China's urban population exceeded its rural population for the first time in 2011 and at the end of last year stood at 54.7 percent, according to China's National Bureau of Statistics.

It is expected to reach between 70 and 75 percent by 2030, according to a recent report by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

This would put it on the current level of many European countries such as Germany (73.9 percent) and Switzerland (73.7 percent), but behind the UK (79.6 percent), France (85.8 percent) and the United States (82.4 percent).

There has been a recent debate, however, as to whether China is beginning to reach the so-called Lewis Turning Point, named after the Nobel Prize-winning economist Sir Arthur Lewis, when the supply of cheap rural labor available to move to cities dries up.

Athar Hussain, director of the Asia Research Centre at the London School of Economics, doubts whether this is a major issue in the China context.

"The theory is that sooner or later there comes a point where there is no more labor to be transferred from rural to urban areas, but I am not sure of that," he said.

"The agricultural sector in China employs about 35 percent of the labor force but accounts for less than 10 percent of GDP.

"The whole point of Lewis is that development is driven by the difference in productivity between the modern and traditional sectors of the economy.

"In China, there is still a huge difference so there is still huge potential for the transfer of people to the cities."

Rachel Murphy, a lecturer in the sociology of China at the University of Oxford, said migration is an increasingly complex process in China, and it is difficult to reduce it just to something that occurs between rural and urban areas.

"So much of migration in China now is between cities. I have done a lot of research on return migration. Migrants who have gone to the big cities don't generally return to their villages but to small cities or towns, particularly if they want to create some form of business," she said.

Although it might have been described as a ghost city, Zhengdong New District－the central business district of which was one of the last great projects of the late Japanese architect Kisho Kurokawa－is actually now of strategic importance to the country as the financial services hub of Central China.

It facilitates Zhengzhou's position as a vital logistics center for the government's Belt and Road Initiative.