Long before the city would become infamous for reasons of viral civilizational hazard, Wuhan had been unappreciated previously as the near epicenter of another symptom of derangement. This one, however, may over time truly end up as illuminating an even darker and far more lasting contribution to human history than what has, and will, come about from COVID.
A project called the Wuhan Greenland Center remains, to this day, unfinished even though the working plans for it had been released publicly on July 4, 2011 – more than a decade ago – with groundbreaking ceremonies already held on December 8, 2010.
Yes, 2010.
The world was a very, very different place back then and in ways that have little to do with the appearance of 2019’s novel coronavirus. As that 2011 press release from Greenland Group, the developer, stated:
“China's economic boom has also seen the need for more intelligent real estate projects and city planning and spaces.”
There was little or no controversy, therefore, over the Shanghai-based real estate group’s plans to put up what was meant from the start to have been a crown jewel for Wuhan’s central business district of Wuchang. Having been handed subsidy after subsidy by local and other government bodies and agencies, from zero interest loans (including financing from China Construction Corp.) to land premiums and relaxed covenants, the idea of a 600-meter, 117-story supertall skyscraper barely merited comment.
Even in the aftermath of the giant economic spasm the few years before, that Global Financial Crisis and its globalized Great “Recession”, the Chinese appeared to have emerged uniquely unscathed. While the Developed World of the West only struggled even to meet Mohamed El Erian’s 2010 contours of a “new normal”, especially Europe, Asia and China in particular were immediately priced as bulletproof anyway.
In fact, with construction in Wuchang still in its earlier stages, by 2014 local officials approved plans to add a few more meters to the building’s ultimate height. Though there were some monetary noises (see: CNY; UST yields) in the background at the time, and economic whispers, by and large these were ignored or taken as no cause for concern. So, no longer content to be one of the tallest in China and the world, the Wuhan Greenland Center’s centerpiece was altered so it might rise to a stunning 636 meters (2,087 feet) surpassing the Shanghai Tower for global number two (behind only Dubai’s Burj Khalifa).
Then “globally synchronized growth” happened.
Such a thing wouldn’t have been any problem whatsoever. On the contrary, had there been any real weight behind 2017’s chief economic slogan – the one which slid so effortlessly and frequently out of the mouths of countless Western officials and Economists – it is almost certain that the Wuhan building would’ve achieved its aim years ago.
Instead, in August 2017, construction was halted mid-build, with work stopped at the 97th floor.
The irony, of course, is that for globally synchronized growth to have ever meant something more than a carefully strung series of words, the global economy needed China’s contributions more than any others. To reach actual recovery, to have pulled up and out of that “new normal”, it came down largely to the Chinese economy promoting the exit to the rut first (and most forcefully).
The beauty of empty slogans is that they can hide every sort of problem which arises to confront their emptiness. So it was in Wuchang, too, in the Summer of 2017 when workers were told to go home. The reason everyone had been given for the stoppage was…Wuhan’s newly refurbished aerodrome.
A sprawling and glittering new metropolis of more than 11 million residents, the city needed a serious upgrade to its infrastructure. In 2014, China’s National Development and Reform Commission instead approved a relatively modest RMB 64 million renovation to Tianhe Airport.
Construction there completed in 2017, suddenly the Greenland Center’s height was deemed a possible safety hazard though its site sits 25 km, or around 15.5 miles, away. The plans for the building’s added altitude were known in 2014 at around the same time as those for the airstrip remodeling, yet we’re led to believe no one put the two together until that unexpected construction halt around Floor 97.
Only more problems followed – of the money variety. The blueprints were reworked to the benefit of flyers so that the skyscraper would ultimately scrape significantly less sky, reaching no higher than 475 meters. This triggered the loss of several of the few customers already committed to the development, like Ritz-Carlton who had originally signed on for the top floors which by late 2017 had to be scrapped.
Then in October 2019, still unfinished, China Construction Third Engineering Bureau yanked its workers from the project this time for what it claimed was a “significant missed payment.”
Airport officials apparently had no comment.
One analyst who did comment to the Financial Times, Cherry Hu from Cushman & Wakefield in Wuhan, didn’t need their input, saying, “Demand for office space has weakened considerably due to the slowing economy,” before adding, “The situation is not going to improve any time soon.”
This was, again, months before COVID-19.
Had the problem been Wuhan supertalls or even just Wuhan itself pre-pandemic? No. Other skyscraper projects were also being halted or scaled down in the wake of globally synchronized growth being revealed as one of the world’s cruelest and most damaging hoaxes.
In Tianjin sits Goldin Finance 117, a marvelous structure that actually made it to become the world’s fifth tallest – by roof height of 597 meters it exceeds three of the other five. And underneath that sky-high roof it persists empty, unfinished, and unoccupied even though it had topped out all the way back in 2015.
In Suzhou, a city west of Shanghai with a population also around 11 million, the Zhongnan Center broke ground in 2014 aspiring to 729 meters, like the Greenland Center shooting to take the number two spot. It didn’t make it past 2015 as China’s economy then faced an unprecedented (and “unexpected”) economic and financial (Euro$ #3) shock that year; the very one which preceded as well as thwarted globally synchronized growth.
Construction picked up in Suzhou again in 2019 though calling for a shorter 499-meter top-out, the newly chosen height no accident.
By late in that same year, Chinese government officials up around Xi Jinping’s level were rethinking the whole skyscraper craze. And why wouldn’t they? It was in danger of becoming embarrassing; not just the three projects mentioned above, even the Shanghai Tower, the current and actual world’s second tallest, has been considered a spectacular flop and failure by many, unable to ever be more than half occupied (with an unknown number at below-market rents).
This one had topped out in August 2013, with final completion symbolically just prior to CNY’s August 2015 spectacular collapse (meaning, eurodollar shortage).
In April 2020, China’s Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development proposed a full ban on any new buildings over the 500-meter level, quickly adopted by municipal bureaus countrywide. But it wasn’t just megatall structures in the government’s sights, the same directive also called for cities to set very strict (in some cases unachievable) guidelines on every proposed structure between 250 meters and 499.
And on top of those, local governments were “asked” to consider the basic need for any new developments higher than 100 meters (328 feet).
China’s skyscraper boom has ended, but what does this really mean?
Many reasons will be put forward for it, and not just as faraway runway obstacles. Yet, there is always the simple economics (small “e”) that actually governs these things whether anyone outside of China wants to recognize them or not. When talking specifically about Greenland Group beyond Wuhan in 2019, another of China’s local analysts put it simply as:
“There is a fundamental problem with Greenland’s business model. It doesn’t take into account an economic downturn.”
In 1999, property analyst Andrew Lawrence jokingly proposed his Skyscraper Index which purported a correlation between the world’s tallest buildings getting taller, acting as a sure sign of bursting property bubbles. In all likelihood, in reality the buildings themselves play little if any causative role, and instead are indications of underlying economic fundamentals where expectations for future business potential might end up far out of alignment because, quite simply, “unforeseen” economic downturn.
In the former Skyscraper Heaven that had been China, Xi Jinping’s ban doesn’t just sting the architecture and construction business. This is a very purposeful prong to a multi-layered change and reorientation within the Chinese system. To put it very simply, as Xi’s government has done recently, you need only their two words: common prosperity.
If you hadn’t fallen for the joke globally synchronized growth, you could’ve seen this coming all along. Just two months after Wuhan’s Greenland Center entered its first halt, in October 2017 China’s Communists declared their 19th Party Congress as the one to remember, the one still to be felt long after SARS-CoV-2 fades. I wrote at the time:
“I really don’t think people quite understand just how much trouble China is in right now. That’s no mystery because in the Western media the Chinese economy is almost always described as somewhere between awesome and magnificent (only slight hyperbole). Their government, on the other hand, is not fooled.
“General Secretary Xi Jinping opened the Communist Party’s 19th Congress with an amazing speech. It wasn’t amazing in the respect of soaring rhetoric announcing some actual, concrete commitment to freedom and free markets; it was instead the opening bell for, I think, a very different world outlook.”
From then to now common prosperity. Communists since the days of Marx and Engels see economic growth as like a ball of dough, something that as it clumps and lumps together in certain sections can be flattened back down more evenly by the determined hand of the Enlightened wielding the rolling pin of Scientific State Power.
Deng Xiaoping realized half a century ago that Chinese Communism wasn’t close to anything like that; Mao had screwed up just that badly and left the nation – and its government – caught between Revolutionary Fever and utter chaos and disaster. The ball of dough just wasn’t yet near big enough to roll flat without creating huge voids.
As a consequence, to avoid pre-deceasing the Soviet Union, China would have to embrace capitalism and all its “evils.”
Chief among those is, inarguably, inequality. Freedom necessarily comes out as a mess, with some faring better than others (the socialists merely assigning zero personal blame to those others, giving them superstructures to destroy and creating myths about “society” being responsible for individual shortcomings). Even Deng (and many like him, including Xi Jinping’s very own father) knew, however, that inequality was a small price to pay for what capitalism really does do well when allowed.
More dough.
Modern, wealthy China was made by capitalism – not either Communism or communism. This was the whole point since Communists cannot create a wealthy society, they can only flatten the dough which capitalism has formed and enriched.
But the Marxists have always believed there was a limit, a terminal point beyond which even the freest of free market systems could no longer justify the trade-off between growth and inequality. Western “experts” fooled themselves (then the public, politicians, Economists, etc.) into thinking China’s Communists were becoming committed capitalists rather than typical Marxists using capitalism as a means to a very specific end.
Writing in his 2012(!) book The World America Made, Robert Kagan expected:
“Just as the British could safely cede power to a rising United States, so Americans could have an easier time ceding some power and influence across the Pacific to a rising democratic China.”
The West’s so-called new normal was accepted as a diminished US gradually and happily giving up some power and influence to increasingly more prosperous and more brotherlike China. To borrow the Wuhan analyst’s phrase, this power model doesn’t take into account a lasting and worldwide economic downturn.
Xi has taken it into account and then some; again, the whole point of the 19th. The Chinese have not been shy about what they’ve been up to. In fact, they’ve been very open and public about their dark turn back toward the government’s authoritarian roots.
Common prosperity’s aims are like something from a bad dream; especially if you are Chinese. On the surface, it sounds terrific to those unfamiliar with history; socialism’s destructive redistribution into “free stuff” always does. Take a little bit (or a lot, doesn’t matter since it’s all arbitrarily determined) from the cities which prospered so much during the “late stage” capitalism phase and redirect it by fiat into other areas which hadn’t and to others of China’s people previously left out.
It might seem absurdly nanny-like to us, but Xi’s government banning all Chinese kids under the age of 18 from playing video games online during the week, as was announced just over a week ago, while limiting them to only three hours on each weekend, this has a deeper, very explicit Mao-like purpose.
Mao used the Great Leap Forward to try to create an industrial powerhouse from scratch; by ordering even agrarian workers to begin making steel on their own in their small rural communes. He had expected they would all just figure it out when told what to do. Total disaster, one of the costliest in terms of humans in human history.
For Xi’s Revolution, the reordering of Chinese Society into its post-capitalist phase – with global growth long since exhausted – requires, as the government put it last year, novel new technologies and capacities no one has yet invented. To invent them, not knowing what they even are, this will require full effort in making New Steel (such as, you know, forcing allchildren to stay in the pre-approved books instead of on their screens) at the expense of all prior commitments (including economic growth).
Rechanneling the massive nation’s focus and efforts is intended to get “funded” by redistributing the existing wealth involuntarily “bequeathed” to the Revolution by the developers and industrialists, the capitalists.
It is meant to be a total social commitment (where these various crackdowns are coming from) for transformation. I wrote last November:
“Sure, if the world ever gets its act together, fine, the Chinese will welcome that external boost. They are explicitly not counting on it. Instead, China’s going to develop new innovations and technologies all its own to leap ahead of everyone else. Some might say preparing China for a huge leap forward (uh oh).”
China’s skyscraper phase was itself an outgrowth of its capitalist growth phase. It’s all over now but the crying. And it won’t just be those inside China unwillingly filled with tears. The global economy shifted long ago, and the Chinese are shifting again with it but now going back to their unchanged, fundamentally Marxist and Maoist starting point.
The Western world is still looking for recovery, a second one, as well as the sustained inflation which would confirm it even as every potential pathway for legitimate growth was exposed in Wuhan to have been extinguished a very long time before COVID-19 showed up.