From ‘Ghost Tower' to ‘Hotel of Doom': Asia's abandoned skyscrapers
Towering skyscrapers often create a city's iconic skyline, yet sometimes its tallest buildings can fall into disrepair or remain unfinished.
While abandoned structures can become symbolic of a location's financial or social struggles, cities still have to decide what to do with them. Some are left to rust, others are demolished – and a few become revitalised.
'A lot of these buildings can still have a lot of life left in them,' said Shawn Ursini, the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat's senior building database manager. 'We just maybe need to get a bit more creative as to what their purpose is going forward.'
Here are some of the skyscrapers around Asia that now sit empty or uncompleted – and how they ended up that way. Unattached toilets sit in an open room in the empty Sathorn Unique building in Bangkok, Thailand, in 2017. Photo: AP Sathorn Unique, Bangkok Popularly known as Thailand 's 'Ghost Tower', this looming structure dates back to 1990. The 47-floor building was only 80 per cent finished when the 1997 Asian financial crisis hit.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
South China Morning Post
a day ago
- South China Morning Post
Trump's unpopularity rises among Asian-Americans, Pacific Islanders, poll finds
A small but fast-growing group in the United States has soured somewhat on President Donald Trump this year, as they worry about high costs and fear that new tariff policies will further raise their personal expenses, a new poll finds. The percentage of Asian-American, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders with an unfavourable opinion of Trump rose to 71 per cent in July, from 60 per cent in December, according to a national survey by AAPI Data and the Associated Press-NORC Centre for Public Affairs Research. Notably, AAPI adults who describe themselves as independent are especially likely to have cooled on the president. About 7 in 10 AAPI independents have a 'very' or 'somewhat' unfavourable opinion of Trump, up roughly 20 percentage points since December. The poll is part of an ongoing project exploring the views of Asian-American, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders, whose views are usually not highlighted in other surveys because of small sample sizes and lack of linguistic representation. AAPI independents' unfavourable view of Trump is higher than his unfavourable rating among independent adults overall, which was 52 per cent in a June AP-NORC poll, having nudged slightly higher from 44 per cent in December. Economic concerns could be playing a central role. About 8 in 10 AAPI adults expect Trump's tariff policies will increase the cost of consumer goods, the poll found, while only about 4 in 10 think those policies will boost domestic manufacturing and just 2 in 10 anticipate more US jobs as a result.
AllAfrica
2 days ago
- AllAfrica
Australia, Japan reluctant to commit to US-led Asian NATO
The Financial Times reported that US Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby recently asked Australian and Japanese defense officials how their countries would respond to a war over Taiwan. He also asked them to boost defense spending after NATO just agreed to do so during its latest summit. Colby lent credence to this report by tweeting that he's 'focused on implementing the President's America First, common sense agenda of restoring deterrence and achieving peace through strength.' This sequence shows that Trump 2.0 is serious about 'Pivoting (back) to (East) Asia' in order to more robustly contain China. This requires freezing the Ukraine war and assembling a de facto Asian NATO – both of which, however, are uncertain. Regarding the first, Trump is being drawn into 'mission creep,' while the latter is challenged by Australia and Japan's reluctance to step up. To elaborate, they seemingly expected the US to do all the 'heavy lifting', just like NATO expected till recently as well. That would explain why they didn't have a clear answer to Colby's inquiry about how their countries would respond to a war over Taiwan. Simply put, they likely never planned to do anything at all, thus exposing the shallowness of the de facto Asian NATO that the US has sought to assemble in recent years via the AUKUS+ format. This refers to the AUKUS trilateral of Australia, the UK and the US alongside what can be described as the honorary members of Japan, the Philippines, South Korea and Taiwan. Australia and Japan are correspondingly envisaged as this informal bloc's Southeast and Northeast Asian anchors, yet they're evidently unwilling to fulfill the military roles that their US senior partner expects. What the US apparently had in mind was them, at the very least, playing supportive logistical roles in the scenario of a Sino-US war, but their representatives reportedly didn't suggest as much to Colby. This, in turn, reveals that they fear retaliation from China even if they don't participate in combat. Japan's population and resultant economic density make it extremely vulnerable to Chinese missile strikes while unconventional warfare could be waged against Australia through sabotage and the like. Moreover, China is both of their top trade partners, which opens up additional avenues for retaliation and coercion. At the same time, however, neither of them wants China to seize control of Taiwan's chip-making powerhouse TSMC (if it even survives a speculative conflict) and thus seize a monopoly over the global semiconductor industry. The US doesn't want that either, but the problem is that the two envisaged anchors of its de facto Asian NATO aren't willing to boost defense spending nor seemingly assist America in a war over Taiwan. That's unacceptable from Trump 2.0's perspective so tariff and other forms of pressure could be applied to coerce Australia and Japan into at least spending more on their armed forces. The endgame, however, is for them to agree to play some sort of role (whether logistical or ideally combative) in that scenario. Given that the US won't relent on its 'pivot (back) to (East) Asia', it will likely coerce concessions from Australia and Japan one way or another. The same applies to the other members of AUKUS+, namely South Korea, the Philippines and Taiwan, albeit with perhaps a slightly lower defense spending from the latter two. All in all, the US is rounding up allies ahead of a possible war with China but it's anyone's guess whether it actually plans to spark a major conflict. This article was first published on Andrew Korybko's Substack and is republished with kind permission. Become an Andrew Korybko Newsletter subscriber here.
AllAfrica
3 days ago
- AllAfrica
In bewildered Japan, pro-American ruling party loses an election
The country posing the greatest strategic threat to the United States is China. The Asian country most able to help the US meet that threat is Japan. You might think, then, that the Trump administration would give Japan a break in the tariffs it's imposing on countries everywhere. Think again. The president has imposed a 25% tariff on everything Japan ships the US. That's well above the administration's 10% baseline tariff, which is about three times the average US tariff level under previous administrations. Never mind that the two countries signed a trade agreement during the first Trump administration that lowered numerous Japanese barriers to US agricultural products. Never mind that Japan has agreed to allow its factories to produce Patriot missiles for the US. Or that Japan is cooperating with the US, the United Kingdom and Australia on the one hand and South Korea on the other to help the US meet the China challenge. Japanese negotiators have made numerous trips to Washington in hopes of making a deal. They've returned to Tokyo empty-handed. It's still possible a deal could be reached before the August 1 deadline. But the prospects aren't promising. According to respected Japan expert Jesper Koll, the Japanese are bewildered at the way their country is being treated. This, he said, is undermining the ruling Liberal Democratic Party's reason for being – 'to be America's independent but loyal agent in liberated-by-America-now-democratic Japan.' The LDP appears to have suffered a big loss in the upper-house election held July 20 and while domestic inflation and immigration were probably the most important issues in the defeat, the government's inability to head off American tariffs undoubtedly played a role. I recently asked someone with first-hand knowledge of Trump's thinking on trade to handicap the chances of Japan reaching a deal. He said that unlike the outlook for some of the other countries trying to negotiate deals, Japan's fate rests with Trump personally – and no one knows for sure what the president will decide. But there are two reasons for pessimism. One is that Trump is fixated on imported cars, and more than anything Japan wants a lower tariff on its auto exports. Of the 3,000 things Trump thinks about when he contemplates trade, the source said, '3,000 and one are automobiles.' (The administration has actually imposed a 25% tariff on all foreign autos, not just Japan's, and has made an exception only for the UK, which only ships about 100,000 cars a year to the US. Against Japan the tariff is 25% on everything.) The other reason for pessimism is that Trump's view of Japan seems stuck in the 1980s and early 1990s, when economic friction between the two countries was a constant. In 1987, Trump took out full-page ads in major newspapers blasting Japan for taking advantage of the US. Part of what Trump remembers is real-estate related. After the 1985 Plaza Accord, which nearly doubled the value of the Japanese yen against the U.S. dollar, American real estate suddenly looked cheap to Japanese investors. They outbid Trump on some choice deals in New York City. He has a long memory. Another part of what Trump remembers may reflect his friendship with Lee Iacocca, who was CEO of Chrysler from 1979 to 1992 and a national celebrity. Iacocca, like many in Detroit in those days, was intensely anti-Japanese. Iacocca and Trump invested in Florida real estate together. I was Detroit bureau chief of The Wall Street Journal in 1984 and 1985 and at one point I traveled with Iacocca for a couple of days. I admired his charisma, but I thought he was wrong about Japan. The Journal had sent me to Detroit after I'd spent nearly four years in Tokyo because, as the paper's top editor put it when he gave me the assignment, 'Japan is kicking Detroit's ass and we need someone leading our worldwide auto coverage who understands Japan.' Iacocca and his fellow Detroit Japan-bashers thought they were losing market share to Japan because the Japanese were cheating – low wages, undervalued currency, that sort of thing. The truth was simpler. Japan was making better cars than Detroit and American car buyers increasingly knew it. Yes, the yen was undervalued in the early 1980s, but after Plaza it was overvalued and Japanese car sales continued to grow. Trump seems obsessed with the failure of American cars to find customers in Japan. There was a time when Japan erected barriers to imports. Today, though, the Germans sell tens of thousands of cars there. Detroit makes little effort in Japan, probably because its big money-makers – large SUVs and pickup trucks – aren't what most Japanese car buyers are looking for. If the LDP can't get the U.S. to ease up on the 25% tariffs it could well lose control of the government. The party replacing it would be less likely to partner enthusiastically with the US. in meeting the China challenge. Whether that possibility might influence Trump's decision remains to be seen. Former longtime Wall Street Journal Asia correspondent and editor Urban Lehner is editor emeritus of DTN/The Progressive Farmer. This article, originally published on July 21 by the latter news organization and now republished by Asia Times with permission, is © Copyright 2025 DTN/The Progressive Farmer. All rights reserved. Follow Urban Lehner on X @urbanize
