"The great retreating tide of wasted credit that defined China’s development in the last seven years has left behind, in forgotten byways, a landscape of ghostly urban desolation.

They come like snapshots of de Chirico paintings: Clusters of condominiums towering over dusty towns. Vast shopping malls where the echoes are louder than footfall. Metal mines in rust-belt country with piles of excavated minerals still waiting for delivery trucks that never came."

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