Huang Ninghai began his life in China’s countryside, born into a family of grain farmers in the poor northern province of Shaanxi. He did not finish high school but the pull of economic growth brought him off the land and into the city as a builder, first to Yan’an, near his home, and then four years ago to Ordos, a boomtown in Inner Mongolia.
Mr Huang, 36, is now set to return to the small farming village he came from. The economy has slowed, Ordos has suffered a crash of Dubai-like proportions and the great march of urbanisation in this one corner of the country has gone into reverse.
“This city was supposed to compete with Hong Kong,” says Mr Huang. “Now the property companies don’t even have money to pay wages.”