Evergrande poured $12 billion into an island resort — it delivered a mall with no shops

China Evergrande Group began building Ocean Flower Island off the coast of Hainan in the mid-2010s, reclaiming land to form artificial islets shaped like flower petals and planning luxury hotels, a duty-free mall, a theme park and housing for up to 200,000 residents. The company put roughly RMB 81 billion (about $12 billion), most of it borrowed, into what was pitched as China's largest built-from-scratch entertainment and shopping destination.

Evergrande sold more than 60,000 apartments to buyers, but occupancy stayed extremely low: a New York Times report described 'a gigantic shopping mall without shops, a theme park without visitors, dozens of abandoned high-rise housing blocks and artificial beaches too dangerous to swim.' Thirty-nine nearly-finished apartment towers were never sold and sat on a wasteland of rubble; other buildings never rose past their concrete foundations, which filled with rainwater and became fishing holes.

When Evergrande's broader debt crisis forced authorities to order demolitions on the project in 2021 for illegal land reclamation, the company said the order applied only to the 39 unsold towers, not the tens of thousands of units already delivered to buyers who had paid for a resort that never materialized around them. Those 39 buildings were later designated for conversion to hotel and commercial use instead of demolition.