In Binhai, China, an XXL solar power plant overlooks the salt marshes

At any hour, a column of semi-trailers takes the Jintang Expressway, an astonishing highway that crosses the Changlu salt marshes, on the outskirts of Tianjin, an autonomous municipality in northeast China, which have been exploited on a large scale since the 14th ^century . These salt marshes still covered 300,000 hectares in the 1980s. Twenty years later, their surface area had shrunk by 70% with the development of the Tianjin-Binhai port complex and its industrial and logistics zones.

The marshes were also filled in to build the Binhai New Area, a mega-urbanization project, which was also included in the ^11th five-year plan drawn up in 2006 by the Chinese Communist Party. It includes the Yujiapu financial district, a still-phantom "Chinese Manhattan," then the Eco-city, a pioneering sustainable city... to the detriment of a natural ecosystem. Just three-quarters of an hour by fast train from the Chinese capital, Binhai remains the symbol of the real estate fever of the 2010s, when it was hoped that a forest of towers would be enough to attract businesses and families.

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