How bad is the problem of ghost cities in China?

More than more than 50 ghost cities:

Today we get an answer of sorts thanks to the work of Guanghua Chi at the Big Data Lab at Baidu, China’s version of Google and one of the biggest Web companies on the planet, and a few pals. These guys have used the location data that Baidu gathers about its users to work out exactly where China’s ghost cities lie. And by tracking people over time, the Baidu team can distinguish between ghost cities and towns that are seasonally empty.Baidu has an extraordinary data base to draw on. The results make for interesting reading. Not only does the team identify more than 50 ghost cities in China, they are also able to analyze their spatial distribution and how it relates to the surrounding geography

You can download their study here and play around with the interactive map here.

[image credit: Guanghua Chi, Yu Liu, Haishan Wu]