The district is internationally known for its opulent civic square and monuments and in 2009, made global headlines for having a population of around 30,000 people, which was considered small relative to the grandeur of the built-up space, and was deemed as a "ghost city".

Adjacent to the south is Altan Xire, the highly urbanized county seat of Ejin Horo Banner, separated from the district by the Wulan Mulun River.

In 2003, the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region agreed to transfer the administrative area of Qingchunshan Development Zone from Yiqi to Dongsheng District; in June of the same year, the fourth session of the People's Congress of Ordos City considered and passed the resolution of relocating the municipal government to Qingchunshan Development Zone; in May 2004, the municipal people's government approved the detailed control plan and renamed it as Kangbashi New District.

[7] By 2010, the current city on a site of 35 square kilometres (14 sq mi) had capacity for at least 300,000 people, created with an estimated investment of around 1.1 trillion yuan ($161 billion).

Other: Ordos City High tech Industrial Park (鄂尔多斯市高新技术产业园区) There is a campus of Beijing Normal University and a municipal library.

[11] Characterized as a ghost town, Kangbashi was made world-famous by a news report in November 2009 from Al Jazeera,[12] later picked up and expanded through an April 2010 article in Time magazine,[13] for having few residents but massive amounts of empty residential housing and high-tech public works projects.