The founding of new towns has been at the core of urban planning since the onset of civilisation. In recent times, policymakers have shown renewed interested in the creation of towns to channel regional economic growth. A prominent example is China, where a large-scale urban planning programme began in the 1980s to cope with the pressure of a growing urban population. The idea was to relocate hundreds of millions of rural inhabitants to live in purpose-built towns. Western media has branded these new towns as ‘ghost towns’, as ‘bridges to nowhere’, or as towns in search of populations.