When Zhang Zhenhua arrived to Tianjin in 2014 to take on a job as a security guard at a luxury apartment complex, he didn’t expect to work in a surreal ghost town of vacant office canyons and half-finished high-rises.
Yet that’s pretty much what Zhang, who hails from a village in nearby Hebei, encountered when he reported for duty in Tianjin’s Xiangluowan district, the epicenter of the northern port city’s audacious proposal to create a 1.59 square kilometer replication of Manhattan. "The place was empty," Zhang recalled. "I could barely see anyone on the street."
