James Kynge

That makes it five times larger than Red Square in Moscow.

The Free Gorges Dam, that's the biggest dam in the world.

I would say that really, I don't know about in the past, but certainly now, I'd say that some of this gigantism owes its heritage to China's self-image, an image of itself

as a civilization at the center of the world, a really consequential player.

And I think this filters through into, I don't know, central government wanting to build big things, make big statements, and local governments too.

What's your sense of that, Alice?

encapsulate the awesomeness and the grandeur and the size of of china in any case i think it looks now as if the government is wanting to curb some of the excesses of this sort of wave of gigantism um it turns out that a there is a proposed uh tower in wuhan city which is supposed to be one kilometers tall that would make it the tallest building in the world overtaking

the Burj Khalifa, which is that huge building in Dubai.

The Burj Khalifa, just for your reference, is 828 meters tall or 2,717 feet.

But this one, if it was built, the one in Wuhan, would be a full kilometer tall.

But it looks like that has been kiboshed by the government.

And there have been a couple of recent directives that have come out

In 2021, the Ministry of Housing and Urban Rural Development said there's a ban on new skyscrapers taller than 500 meters, and there's a smaller threshold for smaller cities.

And they've started to name and shame local authorities that kind of get too caught up in this

kind of urge to build big things.

So as you said, Alice, these vanity projects, I guess some of them are vanity projects and some of them are not.

I mean, some of them, you know, maybe this escalator in Chongqing seems to be, as you said, a fairly ergonomic and efficient way of moving people up a very steep hill.

But some of these are probably vanity projects, and it seems that the government wants to crack down on that.

So maybe we'll never see that kilometer-high building.

I don't know.