Walking Zhengzhou (China)

A rust belt city, without the rust

(This is my sixth piece on China, with the prior five here: Shanghai, Beijing, Xi’an , Beijing versus Shanghai, and from two weeks ago, Kunming.)

I don’t remember hearing of Zhengzhou before, despite being a lifelong geography nerd, despite decades of reading about China, and despite my four recent trips there. In my defense, it’s not a name that sticks in Western ears, other than sounding made up, a cartoonish version of Chinese like chop suey, and after all it is hard to keep all of the ten-million-plus-sized cities straight in a country with a surfeit of them.

It was the only city with a direct flight from Taipei I didn’t recognize immediately, so I booked a trip to it because I wanted to see a less obvious part of China, to test my theory that all of their cities are strikingly similar: A commonality that isn’t an accident, or entirely due to my simplifying Western eye, but instead a natural result of a decades long top-down political, social, and cultural agenda, with an explicit plan to move forward, as a unified country, towards the next goal, as explicitly detailed every five years.

It so happened that exactly as I was flying to Zhengzhou, the fifteenth of China’s Five-Year Plans (2026 - 2030) was being drafted at the “ongoing fourth plenary session of the 20th Communist Party of China Central Committee,” a plan that was “expected to further advance the country’s modernization drive,” as lauded in the China Daily paper I found on my China Southern seat¹.

That ‘modernization drive’ now defines China and nothing will stand in its way. Not the contrast between what it’s pursuing and its titular Communist ideology², not the messy, dirty, and impoverished physical past, and certainly not the one, or two, even a million objections that its rigid growth plan literally and figuratively bulldozes away things many hold dear. China cares about its prior history, but only as an informing legacy for why its destiny is one of global apogean greatness.

That much I knew from my prior trips, so when I boarded my flight, I hadn’t done deep research on Zhengzhou itself, beyond locating where I wanted to stay, which was near a metro hub, and hopefully as close to the largest pedestrian mall as possible.

Both afford the greatest flexibility for exploring a city that I was certain would be place-independent, in the sense that each neighborhood was almost certainly a carbon copy of any other. The same square-mile building blocks repeated endlessly: stalls, stores, and restaurants along the edges, malls at the corners, gated apartment complexes inside—varying only by when in the last twenty-five years they were built.

Given how much I’ve read about China over my life, I should have immediately recognized Zhengzhou, because it’s home to Foxconn’s massive “iPhone City” factory, a political hot potato. It was also one of the supposed locations of Chinese ghost cities (neighborhoods really), those vast tracts of empty apartment complexes, malls, and metro stops to nowhere. Stories about them populated reports on China circa 2015. They were another argument in Western analysts’ three-decades-long ever-changing proclamation that the Chinese model was a paper dragon, a billion people Potemkin village, just a hair trigger away from utter collapse. Really, just wait, the collapse will come, this time I’m certain of it, you can bet your portfolio, and your sense of American greatness on it.

Within twenty minutes of landing, on the metro forty miles outside of the city center, surrounded and hemmed in by rambunctious high schoolers high on Friday night adrenaline, watching the evolving scene outside of massive sprawling modern factory complexes, first juxtaposed against vast construction sites of rising apartment buildings, and then completed “building blocks,” I knew the ghost cities story was a joke, a complete misunderstanding of China, and how it evolves.