Link: https://indiandefencereview.com/in-2008-china-was-buildingsubway-stations-in-the-middle-of-nowhere-by-2025-the-worldrealized-how-naive-it-had-been/
Please see the link above for the source text.
In 2008, China Was Building Subway Stations in the Middle of Nowhere.
2025, the World Realized How Naive It Had Been
In 2015, China’s subway stations in the middle of nowhere were mocked as billion-dollar blunders. A decade later, they’ve triggered a stunning urban shift few saw coming.
Evelyn Hart
November 24, 2025
Everyone Laughed At China’s “ghost Stations” In 2015—then The Cities Showed Up, And So Did The Silence | Indian Defence Review
In 2015, passengers stepping off at Caojiawan Station in Chongqing emerged into silence. Surrounded by overgrown weeds, no paved roads, no buildings, and no clear direction, the subway stop seemed like a surreal outpost in a post-apocalyptic landscape. The platforms were real. The exits existed. The riders, however, did not.
Images of such stations, planted deep in rural expanses, went viral across Western media. Many labeled them evidence of overplanning, overspending, and a top-down economic model detached from reality. China, critics said, was laying steel tracks into nowhere—an empire of concrete and ambition with no people to serve.
Next station is … nowhere: Picture of Caojiawan metro station in Chongqing, China, have caused an internet sensation after revealing it’s in the middle of a wasteland.
Credit: Visual China Group
But in 2025, the view looks different. Those metro stops now anchor bustling urban developments, surrounded by residential towers, commercial centers, and schools. The cities came. And in many places,
they came precisely because the stations were already there.
Betting on Infrastructure Before People
Unlike the reactive approach used in most of the West—where transit typically follows population growth—China preemptively built subways in undeveloped zones. The idea was not to support cities, but to create them. A strategy that, for years, looked like miscalculation, is now proving to be a long-term bet on scale and momentum.
After the 2008 Olympics, massive investments in transit infrastructure accelerated nationwide. In Beijing, over $150 billion has been invested since 2002, creating 870 kilometers of metro lines. Rationale behind these builds was land value uplift: even in empty districts, the proximity of subway infrastructure significantly raised commercial property prices within a 400-meter radius.
Credit: Visual China Group
This was not just transit—it was urban signaling. Stations became anchors for speculative development, drawing in real estate, road construction, and eventually residents. Local governments, who depend heavily on land sales for revenue, encouraged the process, using transit as both functional infrastructure and a tool for urban branding.
Chongqing’s Caojiawan: From Meme to Model
One of the most infamous cases, Caojiawan Station in Chongqing, opened in 2015 to connect a suburban area with the city center. For several years, the three exits led to overgrowth and emptiness. There were no connecting roads, no housing, and almost no passengers. Local staff reported days without a single person boarding. The images were striking: modern escalators dropping into wilderness, neon-lit signage in isolation. Critics abroad held it up as the embodiment of wasteful planning.
Away from civilization: There’s no shop, building or path leading to the station on the wasteland. Credit: Visual
China Group
But by late 2019, the roads arrived. Within a few years, the district filled with high-rises, paved streets, shops, and amenities. Today, Caojiawan functions as a normal commuter station in a fully inhabited zone. Similar stories unfolded in Xiong’an and the Lanzhou New Area, both once dubbed “ghost cities” by Western observers.
A recent article by AS USA shows that many of these former ghost zones now support significant populations and dense commercial activity—validating, at least partially, the logic of early transit investment as a development driver.
The Cost of Boldness
If this was a planning victory, it came at a heavy price. As of 2025, 28 metro companies across China reported combined debts of 4.3 trillion yuan (roughly $525 billion USD). In Shenzhen, the second most-trafficked metro network after Shanghai, daily losses exceed 100 million yuan.
Operational issues continue to challenge the system. Some stations have only one exit, creating choke points. Others lack express lines, and some transfers are long and inefficient. In 2021, the Zhengzhou metro system was severely flooded during extreme rainfall, revealing serious gaps in safety design and emergency drainage.
Exit 1: There’s only one working exit at Caojiawan Station. The other two are hidden in the grass. Credit: Visual China Group
In response to mounting financial risks, Beijing introduced restrictions in 2018, banning cities with populations under 3 million from launching new subway projects. Further tightening of approvals has since frozen or scaled back dozens of planned expansions.
Even now, ridership in some new zones still lags behind forecasts. The infrastructure exists, but monetizing and maintaining it is a different challenge. With rising operating costs and public scrutiny, local transit agencies are under pressure to transition from rapid builders to disciplined operators.
A Model That Can’t Be Cloned—But
Shouldn’t
Be Ignored
China’s experiment in transit-led urbanization is unlikely to be replicated wholesale. It was made possible by a centralized system that allowed planners to commit to long-term projects with little concern for short-term ROI or political backlash. The question isn’t whether other countries will copy it—but whether they’ll learn from it.
In fast-growing economies facing climate migration, urban overcrowding, and housing pressure, there may be lessons in China’s approach to sequencing infrastructure before need becomes desperation. The backlash against overbuilding should not obscure what was, in many cases, a form of radical patience: betting that people follow systems, not the other way around.