CCTV Exposes a 120-Million-Yuan Farm Project That Built Five Greenhouses
A flagship 'smart agriculture' park in Inner Mongolia promised 120 million yuan of investment and 300 jobs. A year and a half on, CCTV found five sheds, torn plastic sheeting, and a contractor that existed for nine days before the groundbreaking.
The site was supposed to be a showcase. In March 2025, the "smart high-efficiency agriculture industrial park" in Qianjiadian, a town in Horqin District of Tongliao in Inner Mongolia, broke ground with a stated total investment of 120 million yuan and a promise that it would bring 300 villagers in the surrounding area into nearby jobs. Eighteen months later, when CCTV News reporters walked the grounds, they found three steel-frame greenhouse skeletons and two warm sheds, their plastic film torn to ribbons, no workers anywhere in sight.
The explanation, the state broadcaster's report found, was in the paperwork. The contractor, Inner Mongolia Yuanfeng Agricultural Development Co., had registered capital of just 5.5 million yuan and had been incorporated on 14 March 2025 — nine days before the project's groundbreaking ceremony, as CCTV News' investigation laid out. It appears to have been created for the single purpose of taking on this contract. Villagers told reporters that after the opening ceremony, construction all but stopped; today neither the village nor the town government can locate the company at all.
How a firm like that wins a project of this size was described to CCTV by a source in the construction industry. Such companies, he said, take on the development rights without putting in any money of their own, then flood social media with subcontracting notices. Several construction crews are recruited to start at once, advancing their own costs in the expectation of settlement later. To keep up appearances, the site is fitted out with offices for "project management, supervision and construction departments" — a stage set. When the promised payments never come, the crews' cash is gone, the work stops and the company disappears.
The scheme thrives on exactly the policy it was supposed to embody. The central "No. 1 document" that opens each year's rural policy agenda has promoted modern facility agriculture for years, CCTV noted, and a phrase like "smart, high-efficiency agriculture" carries enough official weight to open doors and reassure subcontractors. Nor does the case stand alone: in a separate report the broadcaster found dozens of vegetable greenhouses in Jilin province lying idle and abandoned on land villagers can no longer work to replant — the residue of schemes more than a decade old, policed no better.
On Weibo, where major news accounts carried the report, the response has been to ask where the money went. "A project meant to help farmers has become a hollow project," one commentator put it, calling for the funds to be traced and those responsible held to account.
For now the ledger stands as the reporters left it: 120 million yuan on paper, five sheds in reality, crews who paid their own way in and were never settled, 300 jobs that never arrived, and a contractor that existed for nine days before the ribbon was cut.