In the past forty years, more than 3,800 new towns emerged and accommodated over 150 million urban inhabitants in China, which drew much attention since they were reported as “ghost cities” by media in the late 2000s. This literature review examines existing research and synthesizes current discussions through a meta-analysis. It concludes that existing literature, led by environmental scientists and designers, exhibits two polarized debates around the new towns’ uniqueness and the future of ghost cities. Gaps exist in national-scale surveys, criticism of planning methodology, and theories that can explain the current disputes.

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China’s 19 National New Areas (NNAs) are experiencing an ecological transition toward sustainable development since the mid-2010s. Existing empirical studies are faced with limitations in evaluating the NNAs’ ecological performance and fall short in measuring the NNAs’ impacts on the broader ecosystem. The research engages two approaches, the Ecosystem Service Value (ESV) and the Ecological Footprint (EF), to assess and compare how the NNAs changed local landscape and influenced regional ecosystems. Analyses show that, from 2015 to 2019, 15 NNAs exhibit increasing ESV trends with rates ranging from 0.13 to 122.43 million US dollars per year. In contrast, per capita EF decreased in only 8 of the NNAs’ hinterland cities, and the average rose from 4.22 to 4.26 global hectares. The results suggest that the NNAs have begun to show positive impacts on enhancing the local environment while still having limited influence on the regional ecosystems. This mismatch might result from policy-makers’ and planners’ greenwashing approach to building Eco-cities and the over-concentration of resources in the NNAs caused by top-down political intervention. Through analyzing the NNAs’ ecological performance with the two differing methods, this research advocates for a holistic ecological perspective to embrace sustainable developments across geopolitical boundaries.