James Kynge

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.

Yeah, the craze I remember so well, this goes back to probably around 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, sometimes around then, when local governments all over China, well, a lot of local governments in China, wanted to build replicas of the White House as their local government headquarters.

And there were some replicas that looked identical.

Really?

to the White House.

And all of us journalists used to run around the country trying to find these places and take pictures of them and write stories about them.

But that was also curbed by the government.

I don't really know why, but I think they weren't comfortable with the idea of too much mimicry or imitation of America.

That's it.

Thanks, Alice.

Yes, I just want to return for my prediction to the question of Chinese exports.