The Abandoned $100B City Built for 1 Million

The Abandoned $100B City Built for 1 Million
In 2014, China's second-largest property developer launched a $100 billion bet on civil engineering and cross-border real estate: Forest City, a four-island megaproject built from dredged sand on Malaysia's southern coast, marketed across mainland China as the affordable answer to Singapore. Construction proceeded at industrial scale. Towers, schools, mosques, and a six-billion-dollar golf course rose out of reclaimed seabed in less than five years. The project targeted 700,000 to one million residents by 2035.
As of 2025, Forest City has approximately 9,000 to 15,000 residents — somewhere between one and two percent of capacity. Country Garden, the developer, defaulted on roughly $11 billion in offshore obligations in 2023 and was ordered into liquidation by a Hong Kong court in 2024. Tens of thousands of mainland Chinese buyers who placed deposits or paid in full cannot legally take possession of their units, cannot resell them on a non-existent secondary market, and cannot recover funds from an insolvent developer. Their capital is parked in concrete that they cannot occupy.
This documentary traces how the largest occupied modern ruin on Earth got built. The role of China's January 2017 capital controls in cutting off Forest City's primary customer base. The engineering problems with maintaining tropical concrete in a near-empty city. The environmental damage from large-scale sand dredging across the Johor Strait. The Sultan of Johor's quiet exit. Malaysia's September 2024 attempt to revive the project as a Special Financial Zone. And what Forest City means for the 30+ comparable cross-border megaprojects sitting at various stages of similar failure right now.
Sources: Reuters, Financial Times, Bloomberg, South China Morning Post, Wall Street Journal, Channel News Asia, The Edge Malaysia, Mongabay environmental reporting, Hong Kong court filings on Country Garden Holdings.
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Chapters
0:00 Intro
0:09 The $100 Billion Ghost City
1:30 How One Job Became Zero
2:00 The Vision — Why Anyone Thought This Would Work
7:00 The Engineering — Tropical Concrete With Nobody Home
12:30 The Aftermath — Trapped Capital and a Quiet Bailout
18:00 What Forest City Means

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