The six-story apartment buildings rise improbably from water-covered fields flecked light green with newly transplanted rice shoots. Too improbably.
"They're empty," said Wen Zhenghao, a government spokesman. "The local people don't want them."Hunchun, once a listless frontier town tucked between Russia and North Korea, is a monument to anticipation.
In Hunchun, Chinese planners envision arising from the rich brown soil the commercial capital of a free-trade zone designed to transform a remote patch of northeast Asia where the borders of China, Russia and North Korea converge.
So far, historic suspicions, bureaucracy, corruption and beggar-thy-neighbor competition for scarce capital have left the four-year-old Tumen River Economic Development Area more blueprint than gold mine.
Named for the river that runs between China and North Korea and then, on its last 10 miles to the Sea of Japan, North Korea and Russia, the Tumen zone was dreamed up by U.N. planners and officials from the three countries, Mongolia and South Korea.
The idea is to use Chinese labor, Mongolian, Russian and North Korean raw materials, and, with South Korean and other foreign money, turn out goods for sale worldwide.
Hunchun, local officials say, is ready. The government has invested $120 million in infrastructure, and foreign companies, mostly South Korean, have sunk $35 million into factories and real estate.
The city of 60,000 people has three-star hotels, mostly vacant, a state-of-the-art telecommunications center, with not much phone traffic, and four-lane streets, with bicycles and horse carts outnumbering cars and trucks.
It has a railroad that runs almost to the Russian border. The last several hundred yards are to be completed by October.
What Hunchun lacks is robust trade with Russia and North Korea.
"They are both relatively closed now," said Jin Shanhu, vice director of a committee overseeing border trade and investment. "But they are making plans."
Only a few trucks use the Russian border crossing 9 miles from Hunchun every day, Chinese border guards said. On the other side of the valley, a half-dozen trucks waited one July afternoon to carry flour across the concrete bridge to North Korea.
In the city of Tumen, another border trade center 30 miles up river, government offices closed one Tuesday afternoon for a soccer match.
"The future of the Tumen River Economic Development Area depends largely on the opening of North Korea," Li Chengji, vice director of the city's border trade office, said during a half-time interview. "But it's hard to say how it will open up."
China's secretive, Stalinist neighbor seems to be trying.
North Korean trade officials toured Japan, Hong Kong, Thailand, Singapore and Australia in July to pitch their part of the Tumen plan, the Rajin-Sonbong free trade zone.
Rajin port, 15 miles from the mouth of the Tumen, is being improved, and a Thai company, Loxley, is building a $28 million telecommunications network.
But the roads in the zone aren't paved and may not be in time for a Sept. 13-15 showcase conference North Korea hopes will draw interested investors.