Why is China constructing large, well-designed "ghost cities" that are completely devoid of people?

Now, the BBC reports a giant new Chinese-built city has been spotted in Africa in the outskirts of Angola's capital Luanda.

The city, Nova Cidade de Kilamba, was designed to hold up to a half million people and features 750 eight-story apartment buildings, 12 schools and more than 100 retail units, according to the report.

State-owned China International Trust and Investment Corporation reportedly took less than three years to build the city at a cost of $3.5 billion. It covers 12,355 acres.

BBC former Angola correspondent Louise Redvers reported that they discovered that the city's buildings are completely empty.

TRENDING: Texas AG announces 134 felony charges after busting alleged mail-ballot fraud ring

The empty cities aren't only in Africa.

WND and Jerome Corsi's Red Alert reported just last year that Google Earth photographs of China depict city after city of vast complexes consisting of office skyscrapers, government buildings, apartment buildings, residential towers and homes, all connected by networks of empty roads – with some of the cities located in China's truly most inhospitable locations.

Images of these "ghost cities" – after countless billions of dollars have been spent on the towns' design and construction – reveal nobody lives in them.

Block after block of empty houses and apartment buildings, glamorous public buildings, magnificent public parks and sports complexes, even art museums, remain entirely empty.

"The photographs look like giant movie sets prepared to film apocalyptic motion pictures in which some sort of a neutron war or bizarre natural disaster has eliminated people from the face of the earth while leaving the skyscrapers, sports stadiums, parks and roads perfectly intact," Corsi noted. "One of China's ghost cities is actually built in the middle of a desert in Inner Mongolia."

Business Insider ran a series of photos of these Chinese ghost cities. One showed no cars in the city except for approximately 100 parked in largely empty lots clustered around a government building, and another showed a beautiful wetland park with people added using Photoshop.

At the time, China had an estimated inventory of 64 million vacant homes and was building up to 20 new ghost cities a year on the country's "vast swathes of free land."

Business Insider speculated that the Chinese need to put their money somewhere, so developers have decided to build, as a place to store the wealth, even if the Chinese building these cities do not intend to live in them and there is no prospect they can find renters.

ScallyWagAndVagabond.com quoted Patrick Chovanec, a business teacher at Tsinghua University in Beijing, who explained, "Who wants to be the mayor who reports that he didn't get 8 percent GDP growth this year? Nobody wants to come forward with that. So the incentives in the system are to build. And if that's the easiest way to achieve growth, then you build."

The following are some photos posted on Facebook of the Chinese "ghost city," Nova Cidade de Kilamba, in Africa: