CHINA LEADS THE WORLD

Beijing, Feb. 22…China’s Ministry of Aviation announced the opening of the world’s largest airport terminal today.

Designed in the serpentine form of a Dragon, the Chinese symbol of power, the Beijing Terminal is 1.8 miles long, 17% larger than all the terminals at Heathrow Airport combined. Chinese officials boast that the project went from the drafting table to ribbon cutting in four years, a world record. Built by a non-union work force of 50,000, working six day weeks and 16 hour shifts, it is modeled after an Imperial palace with vermilion walls and golden roofs and it is meant to impress the millions of visitors who will be arriving for the 2008 Olympic games.

According to The Economist magazine, China is in the throes of a building frenzy
that will cost 200 billion USD over the next three years.
It is slated to open the world’s longest sea-crossing bridge, a 23-mile span across
Hang Zhou Bay in June

China’s first bullet train will make the sixty-five mile journey between Beijing and Tianjin in less than a half hour.

The Ministry of Communications says China has built 35,000miles of toll expressways since 1993. “We achieved in 15 years what it took the West 40 years to accomplish,” an official said. He attributes the speed of completion to the fact that the People’s Republic does not have to seek permission from the people to expropriate their land and change the shape and ecology of their cities. “Democracy sacrifices efficiency,” he says.

China is now embarking upon what one official says, “will be the greatest engineering project in the history of the world.” Plans have been approved for an expressway from Beijing to Taipei, the capital of independent Taiwan, which means that part of the road will have to bridge the 90-mile Taiwan Strait. Completion is scheduled by 2030, by which time China expects to be “united” with Taiwan, the official said.

China may be catching up to the West in infrastructure development, but it has long led in other departments.
It is number one in poverty: it is estimated that 200 million Chinese live on the equivalent of $1 a day.

It claims to be number two in prison population, second to the US, which has the largest number of incarcerated in the world. But Harry Wu, a human rights activist disputes this statistic. Wu, who spent sixteen years in prison for criticizing the government, says that there are between eighteen and twenty million people imprisoned in China, many for political offenses.

China is the undisputed world champion of executions. According to Amnesty International the Chinese executed more people in the last three months than the rest of the world did in the last three years. The NY Times estimates that between 10 and 15,000 executions take place every year. Hoping to avoid adverse publicity in their Olympic years the Chinese have lowered that number by 10 per cent.

Capital crimes in China range from stealing petrol and “disrupting the stock market” to “selling harmful foodstuffs” and “aiding Tibetan border crossings.”

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