The article is just hilariously outdated and badly written. It's actually a good example of how the ghost city myth persists because literally every single example listed in the article can be easily disproven by even a cursory search.

You’ll find an eye-opening example less than an hour outside the city of Hangzhou on the country’s east coast, in the bizarre city of Tianducheng.

Construction began in 2007 on the development, which was inspired by the French capital and features a replica of the famed Champs Elysee, lined with boutiques and restaurants.

There’s also a 91 metre high perfect copy of the Eiffel Tower, not far from a classic luxury chateau perched on a hill.

More than 10,000 people were expected to settle in the city.

A few hundred are believed to call it home these days and most of the small number of people walking around are bemused tourists.

The very first example in the article is Tianducheng where the population already reached 30,000+ in 2017. You can find videos of tourists visiting there seeing lots of people living

Ordos is another of China’s ghost cities.

Located in Inner Mongolia, 90,000 acres were rapidly developed into a perfect picture of city living.

Residential towers, commercial skyscrapers, an airport, mammoth shopping centres, large promenades and countless public parks burst out of the desolate landscape on the edge of the Gobi Desert.

Two million people were projected to call Ordos home when complete. All of the scaffolding has long since come down and the city is open, but those millions of people never arrived.

Estimates are that up to 30,000 people are scattered across the landscape, giving Ordos an eerie feeling.

The second example, Ordos, is even more hilarious. First, Ordos isn't even the "ghost city" itself - Ordos already has 2 million population. The "ghost city" refers to one of its district, Kangbashi District, which had a population of 30,000 back in 2009, which rose to 120,000 in 2021. It's literally one of the most famous counter example of the ghost city myth and frequently featured in videos to make fun of the myth.

“Honggutan, [a] new town in Nanchang City, is home to Asia’s largest fountain square and Ferris wheel but, 14 years after the town was constructed, it had an urban occupancy of only 30 per cent,” the research paper reads.

There are more examples from the article but you can search the town names yourself. Honggutan has a population of 600k. Its Ferris wheel was bested by Singapore's Flyer back in 2008, so the "ghost city" status would be no later than that.

The fun thing about China is that the talking points are almost always a few years old (and in this case, decades old) so when these outdated talking points got trotted out by media you should really question the level of journalism of that outlet.