Ghost Neighborhoods - Edit

[dukealien]

edit;

Japan:
not worth tearing down
meticulously built
tenantless apartments
rural villages
of empty houses
souls departed
children unconceived


China:
skyscrapers glare down
eight-lane highways
empty, empty, empty
blocks of shoddy flats
dilapidate near nowhere
dissipating savings
ownership denied

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Thanks to all the critics new and old.  I've tried to apply their suggestions as best I could, particularly @Knot's elegant rewrite (for stripping out non-essentials).  I did not change the title or add verses for other countries, though that remains under consideration.  I've also, thanks to @busker, tried to up my poetic craft a bit.

As a general side-note, use of accusations such as "poorly sourced," "misinformed," "ill-informed," and "misinformation" always sparks my interest.  They (along with "rumor," "unproven," and their ilk) evade a central question:  is the information true?  Although an incautious reader might think that assertions so labeled have been called false (or "refuted," a common and inaccurate expression) in fact the user of these terms is frequently evading just that judgment... often with good reason.  "Misinformation" can have two meanings:  the obvious (that the information is false) and, more subtly, that the information, while true, was mistakenly allowed to be disseminated.

When this happens, it's an example of what military intelligence  calls "content analysis" - that is, if regime troll farms pile onto a particular subject of interest, what they say about it is not important.  What content analysis tells us is that the regime is very worried about that subject:  the exact form its worry takes (impugning sources or those who mention it, suppression, complaints of racism, etc.) is much less important than the level of activity.