Empty Apartments in Chenzhou...But Zixing Tourism Seems OK
Exploring the effects of covid on Chenzhou/Zixing real estate and the tourism industry
This is my last section about Chenzhou/Zixing, originally published via Twitter on July 1, 2022. Parts 1/2 have already been posted here, and included a discussion of Chinese lower-tier city life and a commentary on the "median Chinese citizen," plus a look at tourism development in the Dongjiang Lake region. This is Part 3, where I take a look at empty apartments in Chenzhou’s outskirts, the effects of Covid on tourism, and some local food in Zixing.
The day we left Chenzhou, we arrived at the train station about two hours early. Looking across from the main entrance at the station, you can spot this huge property development. From the train station, it looks quite new and impressive, nicely framed against the blue sky and lazy white clouds.
There was no food at all in Chenzhou West Train Station and I had time to kill, so I walked over in that direction to get some food. Here, I discovered what was not visible from afar: most of the storefronts below the apartments were empty, and probably only 30-40% of the units themselves were occupied. You can tell which units have no one living there, because they have no windows/glass enclosing the balcony.
This is called maopi fang 毛坯房 in Chinese, an unfinished unit, a concrete shell. It doesn’t necessarily mean they are unsold, mind you; in China people often buy and hold onto properties in this state, waiting for them to appreciate in value before reselling them to a person who will (theoretically) decorate them and move in. But for now, they are definitely unoccupied.
Out of all the shopfronts on the street level, only one was still open and serving food, a fish noodle shop. Every other shop was either unoccupied or had previously been occupied but was now closed with a padlock on the door and a “for rent/sublet” sign on the door. The boss of the noodle shop told me these apartments were finished in 2019, just before Covid struck.
He told me that besides real estate speculators who bought the apartments and are still hoping for them to appreciate, there are also people who bought the apartments and intended to actually move in, but because of the economic impact of Covid, their fortunes took a turn for the worse and now they can’t afford to decorate. Without the people moving in, many of the shops that were anticipated to serve the residents also had to close, which is why he is the only one left.
Check out those small-city prices on the signboard. 10 RMB (USD 1.50) for 14 dumplings or a bowl of spicy fish rice noodles.
Next to the noodle shop was a real estate office. I paused to look at the prices and a agent came out to chat me up, blinking in the sunlight and 35-degree heat. “The apartments here are really affordable, just 4000 RMB/sqm” she tells me hopefully. “Maybe you could get a holiday home for your next visit?” I tell her sorry, I’m not here to buy property, just buying some noodles.
I ask why this apartment complex was built way out here, so far from the city center? She tells me that the original concept was to have a high-end community close to the railway station, so that big-city urbanites could have an easy-access second home. Chenzhou West happens to sit right on the high-speed rail route that connects the major cities of central China to Guangzhou and then Shenzhen, just a few hours in each direction. But since Covid, travel is down and no one is interested in picking up a property here. Nevertheless, I noted that just across the street, another property developer is still feeling optimistic:
Even though the area was mostly empty, it did show signs of its previous ambitions to be a higher-end neighborhood. I had noted an “international kindergarten” up the street while searching for food, but it was impossible to tell if it had failed or was just closed for the summer holiday. There was also a nicely-decorated boutique grocery that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a mall in Shanghai or Shenzhen, except that it was nearly empty. I stopped in to buy some snacks for the train ride, including some of the local Zixing fruit.
These empty storefronts reminded me that I had seen the same thing when we were back in Zixing as well: new residential property developments with mostly-empty shop spaces on the street level. I supposed that the developers had either overestimated the demand for commercial property, or the decline in tourism caused by Covid slowed down its growth significantly. Either way, there were many sections of street in Zixing where you were flanked on both sides by empty shopfronts and closed garage roller doors.
Besides those empty storefronts, I had seen other signs of an economy in transition back in Zixing, such as abandoned factory sites. This particularly site was totally empty and open. After the previous tenants moved out, I guess no one moved in. I passed by a few that looked like this, but this one was even available to freely walk in and take a look around. It reminded me of scenes from the US Rust Belt.
It looks like this factory used to make or package some kind of cleaning product. There were still a few units scattered around. There was also a lot of broken glass on the ground though, so I didn’t venture in too deeply.
I guess the main difference from the Rust Belt is that the local economy isn’t collapsing with the loss of its manufacturing, but rather intentionally leaving it behind in favor of tourism. Overall, it seems they’re getting by okay. Most of their tourism now comes from Hunan and nearby provinces, which haven’t been hit as badly by recent Covid outbreaks. Our guesthouse and the bigger hotel next door seemed pretty well booked the nights that we stayed, including during the work week
Because Zixing is small and still very rural in some areas, it was a great place to observe the exact border between the countryside and the urbanized areas. Sometimes they were just across from the street from each other. I’ve always seen the “high-rises next to fields” situations from trains, but this was my first time to walk through it personally. Like someone drew a line on the ground through a field and said “here, we shall build an apartment tower” (actually that’s probably pretty much exactly how it went down).
I came across a wheelchair parked overlooking these fields. I wished its owner was there to chat with when I walked by. I bet they'd have great stories to share of Zixing’s development, as dusk fell over the fields and the twinkling lights of the high-rises appeared. But who am I kidding? I probably wouldn't be able to understand a single word they say.
Many of things about Zixing reflect its just-barely-urbanized-on-the-edge-of-being-a-rural-township status. Here’s one of the two hospitals in town, just a single building (where we went to get PCR tested). Look how cute and little it is!
The morning before we left, I had to come to this hospital to pick up my PCR test results, but it was before the hospital’s opening hours. Fortunately, you could pick up a paper version of the negative test results via self-serve. Not by scanning a machine or anything…nah…they just left the test results in a pile outside the entrance (which was also unsecured). Just flip through the papers and find your results yourself.
Overall, I felt Zixing was doing alright. Maybe not thriving the way they would under normal times, but certainly treading water well enough to stay afloat. In particular, tourist-oriented restaurants appeared to be doing just fine. Besides the Zixing salmon sashimi, which I mentioned before, the other culinary specialty was 柴火 food, or food cooked in a giant pot with firewood, rural kitchen style. We went to one restaurant that had built giant woks into the tables, with basically a wood-burning furnace underneath:
Staff added wood and cooked up a huge pot of fresh fish soup and veggies in front of you. Honestly, I'm kinda jaded about gimmicky dining experiences, but this was fun. Their rice wine was good too, sweet, not too alcoholic, and with little bits of rice floating around inside. It was very similar to the rice wine I’ve enjoyed in the past at Longji Rice Terraces in Guangxi.
At another firewood cooking place a few nights later, we got this duck dish. It was tasty, but one of the spiciest things I’ve had on my trip so far, even for Hunan. And my tolerance for heat is quite high, as anyone who knows me could attest. This was some real fiery stuff…not for the faint of heart:
Last Thoughts
In closing I’d like to finally circle back to my point that started this whole section about Chenzhou and Zixing.
Here’s what I believe: If you don't take the time to learn about the prefecture-level cities and the even-smaller county-level cities beneath them, especially that people that live there, you'll ALWAYS be worse at your China-related job. Sales, consulting, natsec, it doesn't matter. Maybe it sounds like I’m repeating myself here, but I feel there are enough people trying to do China work worldwide without adequately appreciating this fact that it has to be repeated, loudly and often.
I realize it's a big challenge to get over to China right now, maybe impossible if you could only consider student or tourist visas, which are still not available right now in most cases. But if you take your China work seriously, and you’re eligible for any other kind of visa, you've got to try to do it. Yeah, a quarantine stinks, and yeah, it’s probably going to take longer and cost more than it used to, getting over here. But if you can’t make that investment in your own expertise and credibility, you’re just allowing your knowledge to get more and more outdated, your analysis and commentary more and more obsolete. And no, sorry, monitoring Weibo is just not a substitute!
You need to get over here and talk to people. You need to ask open questions and give a chance for your assumptions to be challenged. You need to create opportunities for people to ramble and then listen to them ramble.
People share amazing, insightful, eye-opening things when you just let them talk about whatever they feeling like sharing, instead of steering them towards what you hoped/expected they’d say.
You won’t always find a superstar interviewee like Mrs. Xu or Mr. Yu, of course. You'll have plenty of chats that go nowhere, or only confuse you. But when you get those amazing conversations, it's all worth it. There's no substitute for it. It's like a window to insight opens in your brain, and I love it.
This concludes the Twitter content focused on Chenzhou and Zixing. If you were confused by some of the people or information mentioned, you can go back and check the previous post about Chenzhou.