"Those Chinese cities “built for no one” don’t stay empty; over time they get filled up with people who come to partake of the infrastructure that was built in advance for them. The oldest and perhaps famous example is surely Shanghai’s Pudong New District, the original “ghost city” east of the Huangpu River, the empty buildings of which Milton Friedman famously sneered at in 1988 upon visiting, declaring it “a statist monument for a dead pharaoh on the level of the pyramids”...
Comparable outcomes have been observed in Tianjin’s Yujiapu District and Zhengzhou’s Zhengdong New Area, to name a few other prominent examples of development zones previously dubbed ghost cities. On public infrastructure, China passes the puck to where the skater is going, not where he is right now. They simultaneously also tell where the skater where the puck is going, so he knows where to skate. It shouldn’t be surprising that this approach scores quite a few goals. In fact, the only surprising thing at this point should be the determination of foreign observers, especially the press, to forget how many times China has done this already"

https://substack.com/app-link/post?publication_id=1017553&post_id=168404322