Modern China is like a great freight train storming up a long, steep slope with no summit in sight, all its locomotives straining. It cannot slow or stop. The brakes would never hold. If it pauses for a second, it will start to roll back towards disaster. The whole world would be shaken by the crash that followed. So there is no joy in asking if China has outgrown its strength after ten years of blazing, enthralling growth. But it may have done so. The hedge-fund managers, those canny vultures of finance, are beginning to circle slowly, high overhead. They are starting to bet on the bursting of the Chinese bubble. These people did not become very rich indeed by guessing wrong.
And one of the reasons for their gloomy guesswork is here, in the strange, wistful landscape of Inner Mongolia, birthplace and home of Genghis Khan.
The journey here is full of the thrill and muscle of the new China. With its colossal proven coal reserves of 170 billion tons (about one sixth of China's entire coal reserve and enough to keep a normal country going for centuries), the Great Khan's land, once famous only for marauding armies and destruction, has become important in a new way.
As you get closer to its heart, you see many of the famous new coal-fired power stations that China is building at a rate of two a week. You see forests of shiny new electricity pylons. You see the enormous white concrete stilts of new motorways and express railways, penetrating what until now has been a lonely steppe of soft red earth, deep ravines and prehistoric hamlets of cave-like homes.
You also see the mountain ranges of newly mined coal that are being loaded into the incessant, unbelievably long, low, black trains that trundle in all directions, in cheerful mockery of the West's footling green campaigns.
As my train rolled into Dong Sheng, the main station for the Ordos urban area, a Chinese fellow traveller who had often visited Ordos in the past (and had promised to let me know when we arrived) failed to realise that this was our destination - because he no longer recognised the place. So many new buildings had gone up since he had last been there that until he saw the station sign he didn't know we had arrived.
Someone has obviously decided that Inner Mongolia is to be thrust into the 21st Century in a storm of steel and concrete. This will need people, who have previously been fairly rare in the violent climate and never-resting winds. And so they have built a great new city to draw them in. What would happen if nobody came to live in it? Read More
