China’s great cloud of construction dust

Kari Huus Reporter • Profile • E-mail

Chinese leaders have a tradition of ambitious schemes — Great Leaps, Great Walls, Long Marches and the like — but never before has the world seen a bricks-and-mortar transformation of the nation like the one now under way.

In Western China, workers are boring through the Himalayan peaks to bring the first trains to Lhasa, Tibet. In Shanghai, engineers are racing to build the world's tallest building. Chinese engineers are working on the world's largest river diversion project, expected to displace 400,000 people, and building shopping malls that dwarf the Pentagon. But even these projects, huge by any measure, are eclipsed by China's mega work-in-progress, the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River.

The building is changing the face of China with a reach that goes well beyond its shores, driving up the price of steel, copper and concrete around the world.

To some extent, thinking big is natural in China — it's a big country, and it's part of Chinese tradition, from the emperors who ordered the construction of the Great Wall, the Grand Canal and the Forbidden City, to the megalomania of Communist leader Mao Zedong. But now the massive building projects are fueled by demand in the most populous nation in the world, by the ready cash generated by a decade-long capitalist boom and in some cases by desperation.

"I think the building ... is just the tip of the iceberg of what is going on in China," says Eva Lerner-Lam, president of the Palisades Consulting Group, a New Jersey-based firm that works on transportation projects in the United States and China. "The Chinese have the world’s cash, and they are investing it domestically in their own research, development, education and training, and they are using it to buy capital, which we told them to do."

Now, however, the central government — once the main proponent of BIG — is trying to slow the building, concerned about an overheating economy, environmental problems and the social unrest created by the dislocation of whole villages.

But with wealth in the hands of provinces and Chinese businesses, ruling by diktat is no longer as easy as it once was.

Race to the skies
Chinese and foreign investors are enthusiastically competing for superlatives. The 101-story Shanghai World Financial Center, scheduled for completion in 2007, is designed to be 20 meters higher than the world's current tallest building, the Taipei Financial Center.

China has competition, however, from builders in New York and Dubai, who aim to surpass Shanghai's skyscraper in 2009.

When it comes to shopping malls, though, it will be hard to outdo China, home to 1.2 billion consumers. Counting on continued retail sales, which grew 13.3 percent in 2004, outpacing economic growth of 9.5 percent, China now has several of the largest shopping malls on Earth, and they keep coming.

The South China Mall in Dongguan will mix miles of shopping with amusement park features a la Las Vegas and Hollywood, Amsterdam and Paris cityscapes, including a replica of the Arc de Triomphe. At 6.5 million square feet, the complex will cover an area equal to 150 football fields, or about twice the area of the Pentagon. That compares with shopping paradises like Minnesota's Mall of America, which is 4.2 million square feet, and the West Edmonton Mall in Canada, even bigger at 5.3 million square feet.

Lerner-Lam says that not only is there more construction, it is improving in quality and likely to reach world-class standards as more and more of China's young engineers and designers return home to work after being educated abroad.

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