China's Ambitious Man-Made Island Now 'a Dead Zone'

On a ring of artificial islands off China's southern coast, the boom years live on as a very expensive mirage. Ocean Flower Island, a $12 billion Evergrande showpiece modeled loosely on Dubai's Palm Jumeirah, was supposed to host 200,000 residents plus armies of shoppers and conference-goers. Instead, it's a surreal monument to China's property bust, home to a mega-mall with almost no stores, a theme park that never opened, mostly vacant hotels with drained pools, and dozens of nearly finished apartment towers standing empty on rubble, reports the New York Times. "This place is a dead zone," says one visitor from nearby Danzhou, whose local government has been left to figure out what to do with the project.

Evergrande, once a symbol of the country's build-at-all-costs era, collapsed in 2021 under more than $300 billion in debt after Beijing curbed developers' access to easy credit. Its founder, Xu Jiayin, who reportedly sketched the flower-shaped archipelago during a 2011 trip abroad, is now in custody on financial crime charges. Local officials who greenlighted the environmentally dubious project, including Danzhou's former party chief and Hainan's former governor, have been imprisoned for graft. Confidence in real estate has tumbled, with new home sales at their lowest level in more than 15 years. Officials have even begun scrubbing gloomy online commentary about the housing market.

While early buyers on the island saw their investments triple in value around 2021, the following crash has left many facing steep losses if they sell. Visitors are few and far between, and when the Financial Times' Eleanor Olcott visited in 2024, she found the island's wedding venue "coated in dust" and its movie studio "inactive." Yet Danzhou authorities are still trying to salvage the original vision, marketing the complex as a "unique lifestyle concept." It has mostly drawn retirees from the north, but with China's retirees expected to number 300 million within a decade, some residents and real estate agents hope that a stranded fantasy could yet turn into a belated success.