The Stone Leviathans: China’s Biggest Building Projects

The Stone Leviathans: China’s Biggest Building Projects
Nov 10, 2011 By Michael Evans , eChinacities.com

From the Great Wall to the Grand Canal, China has been renowned for its massive and ambitious building projects throughout its history. But the lightning-fast economic development of the past decade has taken this particular Chinese tradition to new extremes. Here are a few of the biggest of the big, coming soon to a city near you…


Source: ido.3mt.com.cn

1) Beijing New International Airport
Few of the countless new arrivals who step off the plane in China’s capital fail to be wowed by the massive scale and sleek style of the Beijing Airport’s Terminal 3. Completed in 2008, the terminal remains the largest airport building in the world, and stands as one of the most visible showcases of the recent success and promising future of the much-touted “new China.”

But Beijing is not content to simply rest on its three year-old laurels, and Terminal 3 is shaping up to be simply a preview of the upcoming main attraction.

After months of rumours, construction began this summer on a new airport in the south of the city. China’s aviation authorities have predicted that new flights will overwhelm the current Beijing Airport’s capacity by 2015. And so the new airport has been designed to relieve this coming burden, opening in that same year, with future expansions estimated to raise this capacity to as many as 200 million people annually (the current Beijing Capital Airport handles about 74 million). This would not only make the new airport the world’s busiest, but its projected eight runways would grab yet another record (currently held by Denver, Colorado, with six).

2) Shanghai Tower
Soaring skyscrapers have long been a measure of a nation’s prosperity and success, and so it should come as no surprise that China’s builders are reaching for the clouds.

Construction on the simply-named Shanghai Tower began in November 2008. Designers led by the American architect Marshall Strabala intend that by the time it is completed in 2014, the tower will stand as the second tallest in the world, and the largest structure of any kind in China. 

At 128 storeys and 632 metres, the Shanghai Tower will dwarf neighbouring Taiwan’s Taipei 101 but fall far short of the Burj Khalifa’s imposing 828 metres. But the tower will not only pride itself on height, and designers have boasted of plans for an environmentally sustainable structure insulated to conserve heat and equipped with its own wind farm on the upper floors.

3) Pearl River Megacity
Not content to be once again upstaged by Beijing and Shanghai, Guangzhou has gone all out with a megaproject to dwarf all others. In January of this year it was reported that the nine cities of the Pearl River Delta (including Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Dongguan) would be combined into a single metropolis. Covering over 40,000 square kilometres and holding nearly 42 million people, this would be by far the world’s largest megacity.

Local officials were quick to label the term “megacity” a misnomer, saying that the nine cities would retain their individual identities rather than be subsumed into a single one, and preferred to describe the project as simply improved infrastructure. But whatever the technical name, the project is an ambitious and massive one. With an estimated 150 major building projects spread out over six years at a cost of nearly 2 trillion RMB, the project aims to unify the nine cities’ transportation, healthcare, education and utilities. Simply improving the local rail system will involve the construction of twenty-nine new lines and the laying of almost 5000 kilometres of track.

City planners have expressed hopes that the megacity project will not only make travel around the Pearl River Delta more convenient, but will ensure easier access to schools and hospitals and create a more equal distribution of jobs and industry. 

4) Yarlung Tsangpo Hydroelectric Project
While China’s biggest cities are announcing grandiose plans, a more distant and forgotten region may be preparing something even bigger. For years, rumours have circulated of a massive hydroelectric project concentrated along the Brahmaputra River in Tibet, large enough to overshadow the Three Gorges Dam in both scale and controversy.

The highest river in the world as well as one of the most powerful, the Brahmaputra is a promising source to feed China’s rising energy demands. As the first dams were built in 2008, rumours spread over the planned extent of the project, with one report claiming a total of over 750 hydroelectric plants throughout Tibet. A second phase of construction began in 2010, with six more dams built at an estimated cost of 7.9 billion RMB. 

Aiming for completion in 2014, their total capacity of 510 megawatts would still be dwarfed by that of the Three Gorges Dam (over 18,000 mw). But if the project is expanded to the estimated 750 dams, the total output would be more than double that of the Three Gorges. One prominent supporter of the project recently boasted that the power generated by the Brahmaputra dams would be equal to all of the oil and gas reserves in the South China Sea.

Nevertheless, serious challenges to completing the dam project remain. In addition to running across rough terrain and high altitude, the river also passes through land held sacred in Tibetan Buddhism. And India has long worried that the dams will affect the river’s flow into their own country, raising the prospect of future territorial disputes.
 

Related links
Big Buildings, Big Bucks: The 10 Most Expensive Buildings in China
Foreign Architects in China: Innovation at the Cost of Culture?
Harsh Measures: China Tries to Tackle the Real Estate Market

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Keywords: building projects in China biggest construction projects in China Beijing New International Airport construction ambitious building undertakings in China

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