It's an impoverished county," Stevenson-Yang says. "They built the airport in order to increase the revenue of the county. But nobody ever agreed to land there."
In other words, the airport in Zhangbei has no planes. "We're walking around and — oh, no, all of a sudden, I see cars," Shepard recalls. "There are people!"
"Within the 10 months since the last time I'd been there, people had been flooding into this area," Shepard says. "It just shows how quickly these things can change."
One project that's unlikely to change anytime soon is Luliang's new "Liquor City." It's a gigantic complex of ancient-style Chinese pavilions covering an area the size of several pro football stadiums, surrounded by an unfinished, life-size replica of the Great Wall.
Inside, factories were supposed to pump out tons of high-priced white liquor — called baijiu in Mandarin — for which the region is famous. Baijiu is made from grain and high-end brands have been a staple at official banquets. As recently as 2012, baijiu sales were a staggering $92 billion.
Today, though, Liquor City looks like an abandoned movie set.
Why?
The project was to be funded largely by coal revenues, which collapsed with the drop in global prices. In addition, planners failed to anticipate the Communist Party's anti-corruption drive, the biggest in modern Chinese history. China's leader, Xi Jinping, launched the campaign nearly three years ago, cracking down on lavish spending for which officials have been notorious.
Stevenson-Yang says local officials across China have greenlighted lots of infrastructure projects not because they make economic sense, but just to boost GDP. Now, she says, some are having the opposite effect: They're dragging growth down.
"This is why, as fast as China rose economically, this is as fast as it will decline," says Stevenson-Yang. "During the rise, all of these things were accelerating GDP and now they're sitting around as costs."
Despite a lot of recent bad economic news, it's important to remember that China's economy is still growing. Projects that sit empty one year can rumble to life the next.
Luliang is in recession, but developers continue to build apartment blocks even though demand for real estate is drying up.
Wade Shepard documents some of the country's deserted new cities in his book Ghost Cities of China: The Story of Cities without People in the World's Most Populated Country. Recently, he took a Russian TV crew to see one outside Shanghai.