Welcome to China's largest ghost town, a potent reminder of real estate bubbles

Only two or three people live in China's largest ghost town, Ordos New Town. Most of the town's new buildings-rampant apartment blocks full of unsold flats-sit empty, a testament to China's massive housing bubble, where it has already burst.

LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - Ordos was built around 20 years ago, during the great Mongolian coal rush.

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Private mining companies poured into the green Inner Mongolian steppe lands, tunneling underground and leaving a pock-marked landscape of open mines. Local farmers became rich as they sold their land to the miners, jobs burgeoned and unending convoys of coal trucks dominated the roads.

But just ten years later the city is now empty, albeit brand new, a testament to the end of China's explosive real estate bubble.

Financial experts in the west fear a bursting Chinese real estate bubble. Pointing out that the Chinese economy is more dependent on house building than the United States economy was before the sub-prime lending bubble burst in 2007.

Many Chinese local authorities are also dependent on the proceeds of big land sales, and in the eyes of many, China's housing boom is becoming a disaster.

These critics have gained the attention of Beijing, who have recently begun to take official action to rein in speculative buying of multiple apartment over the past two years.

However, despite fears in the west and Beijing's recent actions, Chinese economic analysts are much less concerned. They feel confident that the officials in Beijing will be able to quickly balance supply and demand in the housing market.

It has only been 25 years since Chinese citizens were even permitted to buy or sell homes, and decades of pent-up demand are still being satisfied by China's large scale urbanization.

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