Poor Rem Koolhas.

May 31, 2004

Salvaging Jewish Heritage in China, Block by Block

By SHERIDAN PRASSO

Every morning at 5 Christopher Choa gets up for his daily run, logging 8 to 10 miles on his trip to and from the North Bund, which includes the old Jewish ghetto in Shanghai.

A New York architect who moved to Shanghai three years ago, Mr. Choa became enchanted by the area and its history. So when he learned that the North Bund was facing redevelopment, he decided to try to save as much of the old ghetto as possible.

"The history of the Jews in Shanghai is so compelling," said Mr. Choa, who is Roman Catholic, but whose great-grandmother was a Sephardic Jew. "It's really worth preserving. It's part of the fabric."

The ghetto, in what was once the American and then the International Settlement and is now called the North Bund, harbored more than 20,000 Jews who fled Nazi Europe from 1933 to 1941 and another 5,000 to 10,000 who fled Stalin's Russia before that. Viewers of Steven Spielberg's 1987 film "Empire of the Sun" got a glimpse of the area. Known in Chinese as Hongkou (or Hongkew), the ghetto was a haven for stateless refugees in a city that for years did not require a visa to enter.

Almost all the Jews, except a few descendants of mixed parentage, resettled in New York, Los Angeles, Tel Aviv and elsewhere as the Communists took power in 1949. They left behind a charming neighborhood with row houses, schools, a synagogue, a park and even a Little Vienna Cafe. The district is now inhabited by working-class Chinese, some of whom live in rooms lighted by a single hanging bulb and with three or more families sharing a kitchen and bathroom. When Shanghai officials announced urban renewal plans for the North Bund almost two years ago, they said they envisioned turning the area into a masterpiece of the 21st century, a modern business and residential district with skyscrapers, apartment buildings, cruise ship docks and even an enormous Ferris wheel.

The gleaming metropolis that city planners had in mind did not leave room for a quaint old neighborhood. Officials had earmarked about 400 historic buildings for preservation citywide, but in the old ghetto only the Ohel Moshe Synagogue and a block or so of row houses made the list.

Mr. Choa had a different idea. He and his New York-based architecture firm, HLW International, entered a competition to design a master plan for the new North Bund. HLW, along with two other firms, the Cox Group of Australia and RTKL Associates of Baltimore, won.

Mr. Choa, who had already restored the Art Deco lobbies of the Park Hotel and the Peace Hotel annex, architectural jewels from the era when Shanghai was known as the Paris of the East, has experience in environmentally sensitive design. The centerpiece of his plan is creating a memorial park around the synagogue, where there are now buildings, and bringing in gravestones of Jewish residents from former cemeteries. He says his idea would symbolically link the park to the Huangpu River on one end and an ornate Buddhist temple on the other.

Yet creating the park would mean saving only a few more of the ghetto buildings than the city required, Mr. Choa said. By tearing down some of the row houses, developers, who would be chosen by the government, could build more profitable high-rises.

"The choice was to keep the housing or put in a park," he said. "Park space was so underrepresented. I thought the park was more important."

"I agonized a lot about what to do in this area," he added, calling the decision a "Faustian bargain."

Mr. Choa said that no matter what he proposed, much of the ghetto could be torn down anyway. "There's no guarantee that even a municipal-preserved building will stay," he said.

But momentum is growing to preserve the entire neighborhood. An alternate plan has been drawn up by two Canadians, Ian Leventhal and Thomas M. Rado, who are Jewish. They formed a company called Living Bridge, that is trying to raise $450 million to preserve at least 50 ghetto buildings in a nine-block area.

"Our plan calls for the restoration of all the buildings of significant architectural importance, such as the row houses, the Broadway Theater and of course the Ohel Moshe Synagogue," Mr. Leventhal wrote in an e-mail message, though he declined to say how much money has been raised.

Mr. Leventhal and Mr. Rado, who are working with government-appointed preservation professors from a Shanghai university and a Toronto architect, made a presentation to district officials in Hongkou last Monday. If district officials can be convinced of the financial viability of the Leventhal-Rado restoration plan — which also calls for a boutique hotel, an extensive memorial park and a car-free pedestrian zone — it would then go to the Shanghai city government for consideration when they auction the area to developers.

"In principle the government is supportive, and our next step is to do a more detailed version for presentation early this summer," Mr. Leventhal said, adding that he hoped to set a precedent for heritage conservation and development.

The Ohel Moshe Synagogue is already a tourist attraction. No longer used for worship (Judaism is not officially recognized by the Chinese government), the synagogue operates as a small museum and Jewish cultural center supported by donations. A museum plaque listing visitors during the last few years includes photos of Hillary Rodham Clinton, former Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany and former Israeli Prime Ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Benjamin Netanyahu.

Because Shanghai has not decided which redevelopment path to take, no one knows what, if any, buildings beyond the synagogue and the row-house block will be preserved. All Mr. Choa, Mr. Leventhal and Mr. Rado can do is keep urging government officials to consider the tourism potential of the district so that they in turn might transfer that pressure onto future developers.

"You're just trying to save as much as possible," Mr. Choa said.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Tuesday, June 1 2004 Beijing Time

Foreign architects' fruitful days in Beijing

By Xu Xiaoran

Roaring bulldozers, busy cranes, ubiquitous scaffolds, and tall buildings are everywhere: Such is Beijing. For years this city has been a big construction site. So who is the winner? The indisputable answer is foreign architects.

They indeed have had a very fruitful time here. The first three super high-rises in Beijing – Jingguang Center, Capital Building and China World Trade Center – were designed by Japan's KUMAGAI GUMI CO., LTD and SHIMIZU KENSETU CO., LTD as well as Sobel Roth from the U.S. That was just a beginning. In recent years, almost all extra-large projects in Beijing were designed by foreign architects: the new building of CCTV, which involved an investment of nearly US$800 million, was designed by Rem Koolhaas, a great Dutch architect; the English designer N. Foster won the bid for the new terminal of Beijing Capital Airport, which involved an investment of US$2 billion; with an investment of US$600 million, the much-talked-about National Theater eventually was won by Paul Andrew, a French designer.

From super-large national projects to Olympic venues, from five-star hotels to high-grade business buildings in CBD zones, from large enterprises' headquarters to some common residential areas, foreign architects have taken over everywhere. Meanwhile, some foreign architectural design companies have shifted their focus to this country. In merely a few years, China became a main source of their business revenues.

In early March, in a report titled "An Architectural Revolution in Beijing", BBC described the pre-Olympics Beijing as a city that was blindly pursuing works by world top designers, eager to get rid of its image as a follower and show off its modernity to the world.

The decision-makers in China's building sector are highly "accommodating". As a result, this country becomes an "international exposition of architecture". Some "blueprints" come true in China that are of highly bizarre styles and can hardly be realized in the designers' own countries. As a result, although on the whole wonderful works are created, potential troubles are left in some aspects. At the same time, more foreign designers are lured to China to "make experiments". And eminent and poor architects are mixed up. Some second-class and third-grade foreign architects and even those unqualified ones are having their ways in China. Consequently, good and bad designs are intermingled, raising uproars in the society, especially in the building industry. Of course, such sentiments have something to do with the failure of local architects on some major projects.

It is undeniable that because China's architectural education started late and failed to keep abreast with the times due to self-closure, Chinese architects lag behind world-class rivals. However, Chinese designers and scholars are not convinced by the foreign masters, who take away enormous amount of money full of cheer, and their works. From the "eggshell" (the National Theater) to the "bird's nest" (the main stadium for the XXIX Olympiad), to the new terminal of the Capital Airport, China"s architecture circles are engaged in endless debates over the fact that foreign architects are taking over the design of more and more landmark buildings in China.

In July 1999, the scenario for architectural design of the National Theater was finalized. The successful bid turned to be a proposal hammered out jointly by the celebrated French architect Paul Andrew and Chinese designers. The image is a huge "eggshell" situated on a quasi-square pool. The eggshell-shaped roof is like a water drop that lops down gradually. The pool outside looks like a lake. Despite its novel design, heavy cost resulted from the irrational design and the inharmony with the surroundings (the Great Hall of the People and Tian'anmen) sparkled much criticism.

At the end of July 2003, Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron won the bid for the master venue of the 2008 Olympics – the National Stadium. The design is like a bird's nest woven with tree branches. The outside is a gray steel mesh covered by transparent materials, and the inside is a red ochre stadium stand shaped like a bowl.

Proponents of the design maintain that the "bird's nest" precisely represents a new architectural language, and contains Chinese philosophical notions. Yet the oppugners argue that such a design is too "avant-garde" and does not accord with the traditional awareness, and that the excessive emphasis on an unusual style makes it impossible to exhibit the appeal unique to Chinese culture. The design overlooks engineering, structure, culture and cost.

The debating will stimulate deeper thinking. And in this sense it is a boon. Wang Mingxian, a renowned architecture critic, noted, "Everyone wishes that these landmark buildings were designed by Chinese architects. But unfortunately, Chinese architects indeed are not in a position to do so. Then what reason we have to reject these great architects who have achieved immense prestige and success in other countries? After all, their previous experiments have been recognized by the international architecture circles. Among those architects who have come to Beijing, Koolhaas is the recipient of the Pritzker Architecture Prize for 2000, the foremost authoritative prize in the field of architecture; Herzog Schlumberger and de Meuron won the prize in 2001. They are master architects recognized worldwide. And their experiments in China offer more benefits than harm to the evolution of Chinese architecture."

Today, at a time when the Chinese economy experiences robust development, the successful bids of celebrated foreign architects precisely signify enhanced self-confidence of the Chinese nation. While learning from eminent foreign masters modestly, Chinese architects are turning out excellent works endlessly, and the artistic level of their works is improving. Chinese architects' works will also win major bids held abroad in the future.

Source: CE.cn


Images of major Beijing projects:

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http://www.thatsmagazines.com/featur...mp;view=detail

June 15, 2004

A Glass Bubble That's Bringing Beijing to a Boil

By JOSEPH KAHN

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The National Theater of China, under construction in Beijing, is under scrutiny for safety issues, aesthetics and the approval process of its design.

BEIJING, June 14 - Some compare it to a globe severed at the Equator. To others it resembles a phosphorescent egg floating in a crystal sea. One prominent Beijing architect said that when the desert dust kicks up around Beijing, lathering the expansive glass dome in a pall of gray grime, it resembles nothing so much as dried dung.

But the most apt analogy for the $300 million National Theater of China, now nearing completion in the political heart of Beijing, near Tiananmen Square, may be a hot potato.

The building's French architect, Paul Andreu, has come under investigation in France and intense scrutiny in China after a terminal he designed at Charles de Gaulle International Airport in Paris partly collapsed in May, killing four people, two of them Chinese.

His troubles were taken as a green light for China's state-controlled news media and a few leading architects to raise questions about the approval process, the safety standards and the aesthetic sensitivity of Mr. Andreu's Beijing project, which is regarded as a favorite of China's semiretired senior leader, Jiang Zemin.

Beijing's cultural community is also complaining that less than 18 months before the titanium-and-glass complex is scheduled to open, there is no opening act lined up. In fact, no public or private group has agreed to operate the theater at all.

China is treating the 2008 Olympics, to be held in Beijing, as an occasion to remake the capital. The government is razing old neighborhoods, laying hundreds of miles of roads and subway lines, and constructing monuments of modern architecture that the Communist Party hopes will stand as tributes to its leadership.

But as billions of dollars of public money are spent on skyscrapers, stadiums and transportation facilities designed by the world's leading architects, local designers are complaining that many of the projects are overpriced and out of touch with Chinese history. Even in a place where challenges to the leadership's priorities are rarely permitted, voices of dissent are growing louder.

"We are a poor country, not a fancy country, and we should not be wasting our money on monstrosities," said Xiao Mo, an architectural historian at Qinghua University in Beijing who has campaigned against the theater project. "I believe it is an insult to the people of China."

China is not alone in seeking to advertise its rising power through architecture. Societies on the rise, like the United States in the 1920's and Japan in the 1980's, often spend lavishly on new designs that critics consider too grand or iconoclastic.

Yet the building boom here is in some ways unusual. Since 2000, floor space in China has doubled, according to Construction Ministry statistics. Some projects are public works and office complexes of such scale and cost that it seems unlikely they would be undertaken anywhere else.

China also sets itself apart because it is still relatively poor, with an annual per capita income that surpassed $1,000 only last year. Its most ambitious projects are often financed with public money or by state-owned enterprises whose profits come from concessions bestowed by the government. And the architects chosen for the highest-profile projects are usually foreign.

Two Swiss architects, Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, won the competition for Beijing's main Olympic stadium. They designed a bowl of interwoven metal mesh that resembles a bird's nest with a price tag of $543 million. The British architect Norman Foster is renovating Beijing's airport, using a dragon motif, in a project valued at $1.9 billion.

Rem Koolhaas and Ole van Scheeren, Dutch architects, designed an enormous new headquarters for China's dominant state broadcaster, China Central Television, that has drawn almost as much scrutiny as Mr. Andreu's National Theater.

Mr. Koolhaas proposed building two 55-story Z-shaped towers angled toward each other, with the top horizontals linked in a gravity-defying tango. He told the Chinese state news media that his vision is a "hyperbuilding of unimaginable scale and complexity" intended to house all of the television station's functions.

The design won praise among some Chinese architects, but the price offended many others, with some critics arguing that the estimated cost of $730 million may be understated. Beijing is abuzz with speculation that the project may be scrapped as a symbol of the new leadership's determination to cut back on excessive state investment and slow the overheated economy.

Mr. van Scheeren and China Central Television officials say that the approval process is moving ahead and that the new building will be the base of China's Olympic broadcasts.

"I know there's been a lot of high-level political discussion about how China should spend its money and the gap between rich and poor," said Mr. van Scheeren. "But I can assure you it is by no means dead."

Wu Liangyong, a senior architect who has helped the government select designs for state-financed projects, has supported importing foreign talent to remake China's cities. But he argues that the country has also squandered state assets on quirky notions of modern grandeur.

"In my view, some Chinese cities have become experimental sites for novelty for novelty's sake by some foreign masters," he said.

Reflecting the sensitivity, the Construction Ministry announced a new regulation this month requiring foreign architects to enter joint ventures with local architectural firms before taking on Chinese projects.

Even before the Paris airport accident, Mr. Andreu's National Theater had become a flashpoint in the debate. The complex has one large 2,500-seat hall and three smaller auditoriums. They are arranged under a soaring glass dome, which is notable for having no central supporting columns. The dome is set like a floating bubble in a lake. The entrance is an underwater tunnel.

Supporters say the design is stunning and luminescent, offering a welcome contrast to the Stalinist wedding-cake architecture of Tiananmen Square next door. Critics say it fails even to nod to Chinese tradition and violates every rule of feng shui, the traditional art of harmonizing people and their environment.

Critics got a boost when a section of a new terminal Mr. Andreu designed at Charles de Gaulle airport collapsed last month. The accident prompted a flurry of criticism of Mr. Andreu's design principles.The French news media also reported that French authorities were investigating whether the Paris airport, Mr. Andreu's employer, paid bribes to win the Beijing theater contract.

Mr. Andreu, who was not available for comment, has also built the new Shanghai airport, a stadium in Guangzhou and the Shanghai Opera House, making him one of the most prolific foreign architects in China.

"We have confidence in Paul Andreu," said Wang Zhengming, a spokesman for the committee overseeing construction of the theater. "The accident in Paris will have no effect on our building." Mr. Wang also denied any corruption.

But Mr. Xiao of Qinghua University, who compared the theater to dried dung, is one of several dozen critics who have lobbied against the project even after it won final Politburo approval in 2001. He and other opponents have begun a fresh campaign to have it demolished.

Beyond aesthetic issues, opponents say it will prove impossible to run efficiently. The central dome needs to be illuminated and air-conditioned even if only the smallest of its performance centers is in use. They say the underwater entrance poses an unacceptable safety risk in the event of fire, earthquake or terrorist attack.

At least partly for this reason, critics say, the theater has become an orphan, with no agency willing to run it. With potentially enormous maintenance expenses, neither the Culture Ministry nor the Beijing city government, much less smaller theater groups, want to accept the responsibility, according to Wu Zuqiang, a member of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Congress, an advisory body to the central government.

"We've got this amazing piece of hardware in place but no one thought about the software," Mr. Wu said. "You need to book first-rate international acts two or three years in advance."

Unless the government acts quickly, Mr. Wu said, "We are going to raise the curtain on an empty house."

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Workmen completing the roof on the National Theater in Beijing.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Time for Chinese architects to come off the 'Eggshell'

(China Daily)

Updated: 2004-06-29 08:38

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A model of the logistics hub designed by British architect Zaha Hadid for the southeast outskirts of Beijing.

With Paul Andreu's "Eggshell" - the National Grand Theatre, still under construction in downtown Beijing, the National Stadium, dubbed the "Bird's Nest," designed by top Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, broke ground some 15 kilometres north of the "Eggshell" site.

To the east in the Central Business District, Rem Koolhass, a Dutch architect, won the bid for CCTV's new building, "Z-crisscross."

On the southeast outskirts of the capital, Zaha Hadid, a Baghdad born British woman architect, has joined hands with Pan Shiyi, one of the most successful real estate tycoons in China, to develop a logistics hub. The project is expected to be a huge complex of conference facilities, shopping malls, hotels, office buildings, theme parks and top-quality residential areas.

All big names in architecture circles, they are noted for their novel designs, use of new materials and high tech and their sky-scraping costs.

Apart from these top architects, with their landmark projects in Beijing, many other architects from abroad have also been lured by the huge Chinese market. They are involved in either public buildings or residential developments, many of their jobs won through public bidding.

No matter whether famous or not, these foreign architects have also received their share of both praise and criticism. They have brought not only new designs to this country, but also heated debate: Does China really need foreign architects to design Chinese buildings?

A big cake

"China is now the largest construction site in the world. That makes us, as architects, excited," said Neil Leach, a professor of architectural theory at the University of Bath, UK, who attended a recent seminar on avant garde architecture at Tsinghua University.

At the seminar, initiated by the organizing committee of the first Architectural Biennial 2004 Beijing, 12 architects from both home and abroad presented their designs and shared views on avant garde architecture.

Starting from the early 1990s, foreign architects began to swarm into China to take part in the development of the Pudong New Area in Shanghai. Celebrated architecture firms such as AS&P, Atkins, OBERMEYER, RRP and SOM Planning submitted winning bids for some of the big projects in the new area. According to Beijing-based International Herald Leader, foreign architects took 30 per cent of the projects in Shanghai in the late 1990s. Following the 2008 Olympic fever, many of them moved to Beijing and won almost all the big public projects in the city.

According to the Beijing-based Architecture Journal there are now more than 120 foreign and joint architecture firms in China. Over 140 of the 200 top world engineering companies and design consortiums have set up branches in the country. Design contracts for a great number of landmark buildings in major cities have gone to foreign firms.

Like them or not, these buildings are being erected.

Controversial reaction

Much criticism centres on the one problem most new designs have: their failure to achieve a harmony with Chinese culture.

Consider, for example, the "Eggshell" next to Tian'anmen Square. Those who like it say it is unique and avant garde, and those against it call it a "dirty dropping" or "a tomb."

Paul Andreu has been accused of damaging the harmony of the area, which includes the Great Hall of the People and the Tian'anmen Rostrum. Forty-nine academicians of the Chinese Academy of Science appealed to the central government reconsider the design, but their request fell on deaf ears.

The heavy cost is another major point of dispute. According to a report from the International Herald Leader, the "Eggshell" costs are running way over original budget. The cost has reportedly increased from 2 billion yuan (US$241 million) to 5 billion yuan (US$603 million).

The whole construction area, including the theatre and a pool, now covers 260,000 square metres, 143,000 square metres more than in the original design.

The "Bird's Nest" has also exceeded its original budget of 3 billion yuan (US$362 million), escalating to 3.5 billion yuan (US$422 million). For the new CCTV "Z-crisscross," the cost is now expected to far surpass its original 5 billion yuan (US$603 million) estimate.

"I'm not against novel ideas, or unconventional or unorthodox designs, as that is what the art needs," said Wu Liangyong, one of the great contemporary Chinese architects.

"But we cannot put aside engineering and structure, we cannot overlook our culture, or the cost. China is not rich enough not to care about 5 billion yuan," Wu said.

"Some cities in China have become 'experimental sites' for both noted foreign architects and some second and third level ones," he said.

However, some disagree.

Wang Mingxian, an architecture critic, says: "We'd better first have a welcoming attitude towards these new things. City planning and historical protection must allow for a combination of old and new.

"We really wish that our Chinese architects were able to win the bidding for these landmark buildings. Unfortunately, they were not able to do so," Wang said. "Why should we reject these great architects whose previous experiments have been recognized in international architecture circles," he said, adding that their experiments in China offer more benefits than harm to the evolution of Chinese architecture.

Among those architects who have come to Beijing, Koolhaas was the recipient of the Pritzker Architecture Prize for 2000, the foremost authoritative prize in the field of architecture; Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron won the prize in 2001; and Zaha Hadid was the winner in 2004.

Fei Qing, a New-York based Chinese architect, said: "From the point of view of Chan (the Chan Sect of Buddhism, known in the West by the Japanese name Zen, which emphasizes simplicity, spontaneity and self-expression), putting unrelated things together might produce something new."

"When the East meets the West; traditional concepts give in to modern ones, and vice versa. The two might compromise. This can happen in every art form, including architecture."

But Luo Li, secretary general of the first Architectural Biennial Beijing 2004, pointed out that to improve the ability to judge beauty, or in other words, to judge art and culture as a whole, is crucial for decision-makers, architects, developers and ordinary people alike.

"For quite a long time, we have lagged behind in art education," Luo said, adding that in designing a new building city planners must keep in mind the unique local cultural fabric of their city.

"What is most important is not to let new buildings break the cultural line," she said. "We must encourage foreign architects to deepen their understanding of Chinese culture before they work on projects in China."

Chinese architects

The failure of local architects' bids for some major projects has not only revealed the inferiority of architectural education in China, but also the dilemma Chinese architects face.

Architectural education in the modern sense started late in China, in the early 20th century, and failed to keep abreast of changes because of the country's closure of its doors to the outside world from the 1950s to the 1970s, when the world of architecture was experiencing dramatic development in ideas, design and technology.

Zhang Yonghe, a noted Chinese architects, once said that Chinese architects have been trained in classicism and are more concerned with form and style in design.

"I have to admit that Chinese architects cannot compete with their foreign counterparts when it comes to imagination and design," said Dou Yide, deputy chairman of the China Architecture Society, who has worked as a jury member for many international bidding competitions during the past years. "Most of them know very little about new materials and new technology, which has badly limited their creativity and imagination," he said.

However, Chinese architects complain that many developers have blind faith in foreign designs.

Cui Kai, one of the top young architects in China, in his late 40s, complains about the imbalance in design charges. "Many developers know nothing about domestic architects," said Cui, who has won many awards in design including his "See and Seen" villa for the Commune by the Great Wall. Together with 11 other architects, Cui won a special prize at La Biennale di Venezia in 2002.

Cui said that in a joint project, the developers usually pay two-thirds of the bill to the foreign firms, leaving only one-third, or even less, for the domestic designers who have usually done much more of the work than their foreign counterparts.

Some top Chinese architects have to work for some foreign firms that don't have enough designers to handle all the projects they are involved in. All the foreign designers do is signing their names on the final sketches.

The experience of Cui Hongbing, a Shanghai architect, is a good example. Once when he was on a jury assessing international bids for the renovation of a downtown area in Shanghai, he was confused by four plans. Though coming from four different countries, the proposed plans shared the same space and planning concepts used at Tongji University in Shanghai.

After hearing the presentations of the leading designers, Cui got the answer - all four of them were graduates from Tongji University and one had even been his classmate.

Guan Zhaoye, a noted Chinese architect, also a professor from Tsinghua University, urged giving more opportunities to Chinese architects. Only when they are given more chances, he says, can they demonstrate their abilities.

"Chinese architects should improve their own abilities instead of complaining," said Wu Huanjia, a professor from Tsinghua.

www.chinadaily.com.cn

I really hope that China does not surpass american archetecture and high number of skyscrapers.It would be imbaresing

Your level of writing and thinking is far more.

How do you figure? I mean, I'd actually HOPE that they would surpass us in number of tall buildings; there are 1.3 billion people in China!

What does population has to do with tall buildings :?:

:shock:


Where do you think all those people live and work, John?

China shelves office tower

Reuters

Tuesday, July 20, 2004

BEIJING China has shelved plans to build a $600 million office tower in Beijing as part of the government's efforts to cool the overheating economy.

Construction of the skyscraper by the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas was scheduled to begin this month, but there may be "a change in plans," according to Oriental Outlook magazine, which is affiliated with the official Xinhua news agency.

The building, dubbed the "Titanic of Chinese architecture," would have been the new headquarters of the official broadcaster China Central Television and, at 230 meters or 750 feet, the tallest building in the Chinese capital.

"Whether that building will be completed is a big question mark," a senior executive of China Central Television said.

Sources said the plan had drawn the angers of Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, who has tried to curb a proliferation of real estate, cement and iron and steel projects to stop the economy from boiling over.

The magazine cited fears of traffic congestion in the central business district around the 80-story structure, which was to have two inverted L-shaped towers joining high above the ground, as the main reason for the decision.

Some Chinese critics said the price was too high, especially when the government is trying to curb investment.

And the sleek geometric design with a latticework touch was too quirky and would have presented a securities risk, the magazine said.

Copyright © 2004 The International Herald Tribune | www.iht.com

China did a great job destroying much of the tangible elements of its rich heritage during the "Cultural Revolution" of the 60s and 70s. Monasteries, palaces, mausoleums, archaeological sites, even the Great Wall and the Grand Canal: many were destroyed or allowed to fall into disrepair.

Despite all the hype about China's skyscraper boom, I am therefore skeptical and somewhat alarmed at the rate that so many sites that have so much cultural significance are being recklessly replaced with new construction: not just in Beijing and Shanghai, but also the controversy over the Three Gorges Dam and how the Great Wall continues to decay. It's the 1960s all over again, only the destruction is now made in the name of economic progress -- the same mindset that justified the destruction of Penn Station, Les Halles, etc.

most people don't live in skyscraper size buildings. But in work, i can agree on what you said.

So maybe this is the start of a new slowdown in china. Finally!

July 28, 2004

New Boomtowns Change Path of China's Growth

By HOWARD W. FRENCH

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A street cleaner at work near a building under construction in Dongguan, which has grown from a small town to a city of seven million.

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Dongguan, in southern China, is one of a score of cities whose extraordinary growth reflects China's boom and its challenge. Dongguan's thriving downtown, which features new skyscrapers and a major shopping center.

DONGGUAN, China - The cranes peek out from behind skyscrapers in every direction, wheeling and nodding in a slow-motion ballet as crews work around the clock to fill in an already crowded skyline.

Newly planted palms line the sides of broad, newly traced avenues where the traffic lights have not been turned on yet.

Dongguan has exploded from a mere town to a city of seven million in a little over 20 years. But the city officials are not content with a 23 percent annual economic growth rate. They are putting the finishing touches on a vast, entirely new annex city that they hope will draw 300,000 engineers and researchers, the vanguard of a new China.

"We are the first in China to pursue this kind of vision,'' said Wang Jianya, deputy director of the development, called Songshan Lake Pioneer Park. "We're not trying to be the biggest, only the best.''

Dongguan is one of a score of Chinese megacities whose extraordinary growth reflects China's boom and its challenge. The country's rapid urbanization is helping to lift hundreds of millions of rural Chinese out of poverty. But at the same time, these new second-tier cities are locked in a ferocious competition, spawning ambitious development plans that escape the control of the central government in Beijing.

Economists like Tang Wing-shing, a specialist in urban development at Baptist University in Hong Kong, worry about the consequences: waste of resources, loss of arable land, fiscal crises, corruption and pollution.

"Every city wants to develop into a world city, and every one wants to have an international airport, six-lane highways and export zones, rather than integrated growth,'' Professor Tang said. "This is what we are observing in China today. All of the cities have been turned into vast construction zones, and the government has not contemplated the consequences of this yet.''

China has 166 cities with populations over one million, compared with nine in the United States. China's urban population is growing at 2.5 percent a year, among the fastest rate in the world, according to the United Nations Population Division. That compares with 0.8 percent in India, another large, fast-developing nation.

In fact, Beijing has found its powers to slow runaway growth to be surprisingly limited, in part because provinces and cities resist efforts to rein in their investments.

Although the central government allots money to pet development projects, provinces raise money for their own projects by selling rights to develop real estate. In many cases, local officials are judged in part by economic measures - how many jobs they create, how many big buildings spring up.

That means that many provincial officials are trying the same formula: manufacturing and export zones, research parks and self-styled Silicon Valleys like Pioneer Park in Dongguan.

Dongguan's officials, in fact, have even bigger plans.

"In the future our goal is 10 million people," Dongguan's deputy mayor, Zhang Shenguang, said almost nonchalantly. "Beyond that, we may have problems with electricity and water."

But the model Dongguan is pursuing has not always worked. Yehua Dennis Wei of the University of Wisconsin cited the case of Wenzhou, a southeastern city of 1.4 million. Like many second-tier cities, Wenzhou is straining to beat the competition by creating research and development and manufacturing zones.

Because Wenzhou is not that close to the major concentrations of business in China's booming Yangtze Delta, businesses are leaving for bigger cities like Shanghai. Scrambling to woo more business, local governments like Wenzhou keep giving away more land and building even bigger industrial parks.

The unchecked development means there is little ability to consider China's needs as a whole, or to prevent duplication and waste.

Some cities, though, are trying a different approach to growth. One landlocked city that seems to be thriving, Wuhan, which sits astride the broad Yangtze River 400 miles west of Shanghai, has struck on a formula of its own.

To be sure, Wuhan, a city of 4.5 million official residents and millions of migrants, has its own research and manufacturing parks, one of which is a sprawling place called Laser Valley, which contains fiber-optic, electronics and pharmaceutical companies arrayed one after another on a huge grid.

But the main thrust of Wuhan's strategy has been to rely on an old-line industry, automobile manufacturing, whose history here predates China's economic liberalization. By selling off assets to foreign and domestic investors and encouraging foreign automakers like Nissan, Honda and Citroën to enter into joint ventures with Chinese companies, Wuhan is positioning itself for re-emergence as the Detroit of China.

The city has even managed to sell its central location as a boon for efficient distribution at a time when domestic car sales here are booming.

Wuhan is hardly more of a household name overseas than Dongguan, but its recent growth has outpaced Dongguan's. In an interview, the city's mayor, Li Xiansheng, proudly reeled off the latest statistics: 13.8 percent growth for the first half of the year, along with 26 percent tax revenue growth and 50 percent fixed capital growth during the same period.

"In the past, I regret to say, we were left behind by a lot of eastern cities, but Wuhan is determined to play its role,'' Mr. Li said. "If you draw a circle of 2,000 kilometers in diameter with Wuhan at its center, 80 percent of Chinese cities will be fall inside it. We are blessed to be the economic hub of central China.'' The radius he mentioned is a little more than 1,200 miles.

Wuhan is dotted with technical colleges and trade schools, rather than the proliferation of research parks and new universities seen in so many other cities, winning it praise from manufacturers.

"Wuhan has a long history of auto production, and there are excellent human resources here for that reason,'' said Liu Yuhe, deputy general manager of the Dongfeng Honda Autowork, a Chinese partner with several foreign car makers.

There is another reason for Wuhan's success: its higher education is among the best in China's provinces. The schools have faculties of auto production and auto engineering, resources unmatched anywhere else in the nation.

Which approach to economic growth will prove more successful in the long run - export-dominated technology zones or the more deliberate rise up the ladder of industrial development - is an open question.

For all its cachet, Dongguan has dozens of competitors trying variations of the same thing, and many of those experiments seem destined to end unhappily. Wuhan, on the other hand, has found a niche but could conceivably see its star fade like those of America's steel towns.

"Overplanning a city will kill it, but so will trying to make it a steel town, a car town or an electronics town,'' said Richard Florida, an expert in urban development at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. "What you have to do is allow people to use their own energies and allow markets to create the new city in their own hurly-burly way, and that's usually a messy, unpredictable process.''

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Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company