Chinese Jugaad : Traffic Stand-Ins.

The more I read about China, the more fascinating it gets.

Picture this. You are in the city of Wuhan, a major transportation hub of China. It is often referred to as the “Chicago of China” for that. Being such a hub, the city’s affinity with traffic jams is similar to Leo Messi’s affinity with goals. Imagine you are stuck in one of the infamous Chinese traffic jams, the longest of which apparently lasted for 9 days. (I don’t understand how it can last for that long though). You are pissed, honking away incessantly, cursing the driver in front, cursing yourself for not starting earlier etc.

You don't wanna get stuck in one of these, do you?

Just when you think you are going to be stuck in your car for hours together, a couple of guys drop by your window in a motorcycle. One of them offers to drop you at your destination in their two-wheeler, and the other offers to take your place behind the steering wheel and drop your vehicle to its eventual destination. Sounds Awesome right? This is exactly what a company in Wuhan offers to its customers who are stuck in traffic.

Huang Xizhong was the brainchild behind this amazing business model. The service however is limited to people who have genuine reasons to want to escape the traffic jam, i.e. business meetings or if they have a flight to catch etc. The services have been running since 2010 and have tasted pretty good success. The service is available at a cost of about 400 yuan or about Rs.3500. So, In case you are stuck in  a traffic in Wuhan or Jinan, you now know what to do.

This is some serious Chinese jugaad for you.

The Great Mall of China - Not So Great.

AGS Cinemas, Navalur. Opened in the Coromandel Plaza about 3-4 years back. Being within the IT corridor of Chennai, the cinemas have been doing pretty good business. But the mall has remained largely unoccupied. In fact, fully unoccupied. Except for the movies and a few eateries thriving on the moviegoers falling hungry, the entire retail space has found no takers. The reasons probably are being too far from the city limits, and the builders looking a bit too much into the future.

If you think this is a plan gone awry, well then how about this? A mall in China, New South China Mall, which was going to be the biggest mall in the world in terms of leasable retail area, has been 99% unoccupied since it was built in 2005. That’s 8 years running, and still no one has turned up. What makes it more startling is, it exists in an area which is probably the world’s biggest megalopolis.

A usual day in the Great Mall of China

Alex Hu, a Chinese Instant Noodles tycoon built this monster mall in the city of Dongguan in Guangdong province. It was so large in its entirety that it was dubbed the Great Mall of China, for obvious reasons. This mall was going to be the symbol of the bubbling consumer culture of China. It was also ironic that China being a communist country was now home to the world’s biggest symbol of capitalism. On completion, the mall covered about 9 and a half million square feet, with over 2300 retail spaces.

The mall was expected to have a daily footfall of 70000 upwards. It was going to be the abode of retailers from all over the world. It was going to be THE mall in the world. But, none of these came to fruition. China’s “If you build it they will come” mentality had gone kaput.

Reason? The location, though within a megalopolis, was a terrible decision. Dongguan is a city of factories, and most of the dwellers are factory workers. Its connectivity with nearby cities of Hong Kong, Shenzhen and Guangzhou is questionable, with no effective transportation. Alex Hu built it here for he wanted to build in his home city, but it just did not work out. The site of the mall is a complete disaster.

Owing to these factors, the mall bears a deserted look. It has maintained a consistent 1% occupancy rate. Not a consistency the builders would be proud of. It bears the looks of a ghost town. The difference being ghost towns had people before who left due to various reasons. But here, No one ever came. If anyone ever wanted to know how a post apocalyptic world will look like, this might be the right place to be.

Get a detailed insight into this mall here.