Sky-high building boom sprouts in China

(Bloomberg) Updated: 2014-07-25 07:21

The eastern Chinese city of Suzhou is not even the biggest in Jiangsu province, but it's joining a national rush for the sky with what's slated to become the world's third-tallest building.

By 2020, China may be home to six of the world's 10 highest skyscrapers, including Suzhou's 700-meter Zhongnan Center. Developers finished 37 structures higher than 200 meters, or about 50 stories, in China last year, the most in the world, according to the Chicago-based Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, a nonprofit organization that maintains the world's largest free database on tall buildings.

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A jewel in Suzhou's crown

China is witnessing a skyscraper boom, with lower-tier cities like Suzhou vying to erect ever-bigger structures and counting on the prestige and potential commercial benefit those mega-buildings might bring. Construction has been fueled by a tripling in property values since 1998 and government policy that has moved 300 million people－almost the entire population of the United States－into cities since 1995.

"What's happening in China is similar to what happened in the US 80 to 100 years ago, on a different scale," Antony Wood, the council's executive director, said in Shanghai. "Cities are competing both within China and also globally for attention and for the appearance that they are first-world."

The council said Suzhou's will be the world's third-tallest building when it's completed in 2020. Other cities planning or building skyscrapers that could join the world's tallest include Shenyang in Liaoning province, Wuhan in Hubei province and Tianjin, a city 109 km southeast of Beijing that's planning a replica of Manhattan.

None of the towers would exceed the world's current tallest building, Dubai's Burj Khalifa, or the one set to surpass it－Kingdom Tower in Jiddah, Saudi Arabia, slated to be 1 kilometer high.

But what China lacks in height it makes up for in quantity. All together, the mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan already have half of the world's 20 tallest buildings.

Premier Li Keqiang has championed urbanization as a "huge engine" for expansion as he seeks to shift the world's second-largest economy toward a model that relies on consumption rather than investment and exports. The government predicts that more city dwellers and their higher wages will mean more money spent on television sets, travel and new homes.