Dinny McMahon
When Zhang Jingqiang became mayor of Tieling in 2005, it was the poorest city in Liaoning Province. A greying, former Ming-dynasty garrison town of about 440,000 people in the country’s frigid north-east, it was part of China’s rust belt, but large-scale industrialisation had long ago bypassed the city.
Zhang wasn’t a high-flyer. A lean but jowly man with a left-to-right comb-over, he’d spent his entire public-service career in Liaoning, and this was to be his last posting before mandatory retirement, at age 60. But a few years after becoming mayor, Zhang found himself enjoying a rare moment in the national spotlight for the way he’d turned around the fortunes of his backwa…
Read the full article at: http://www.afr.com/news/world/asia/chinas-ghost-cities-and-their-multibilliondollar-debt-20180404-h0ybjz
