Claiming to be the world’s largest building by floor space, the 1,760,000m2 of the New Century Global Center (新世紀環球中心) are a monument to growing Chinese consumer power, packed with shoppers — and beach bathers 1,000km from the coast.
Home to hundreds of shops, restaurants, offices, a cinema and ice rink, the cavernous building in Chengdu, deep in southwestern China, also hosts a water park featuring a pool modeled on the seaside.
“The indoor ocean attracts me more with lots of facilities and activities like surfing and water skiing,” said Gao Nini, 31, who paradoxically traveled from the coastal city of Qingdao to visit.
“We have the sea, but I’m worried I would get tanned,” she said of visiting the beach in her home town.
Ringed by a concrete beach, hundreds of bathers — wearing obligatory life vests — splashed in the waters’ artificial waves, which are generated at intervals.
Behind them stood a bell tower resembling St Mark’s Basilica in Venice, and a monumental screen relaying South Korean pop videos.
The Global Center project has seemingly defied critics, who condemned it when it opened in 2013 as an example of China’s wasteful construction boom, which has left swathes of empty houses outside many cities.
Along with a railway line to Europe and a convention center that recently hosted a G20 finance ministers’ conference, the massive structure is part of Chengdu’s bid for top-tier city status.
Exact figures are not known, but the local government is reported to have spent more than US$6 billion on it.
The Chengdu Commercial Daily reported that 90 percent of commercial space in the complex has been rented, while a staff member told reporters that about 8,000 office workers commute there each day.
Even so, it has not escaped political controversy, with reports linking its construction to Zhou Bin (周斌), the jailed son of former Chinese minister of public security Zhou Yongkang (周永康), who was last year jailed for bribery.
The millionaire behind the building, Deng Hong (鄧鴻), went missing during a probe into Zhou Yongkang, but was later released, local media said.
Inside the center, the pool is ringed by restaurants where customers in swimsuits ate pizza and drank hot orange juice — but the hard-surface beach left some pining for a genuine seaside experience.
“I have never seen the real sea, but I want to see one and go surfing,” seven-year-old Liu Qingsong said. “The [artificial] sea looks good, but it’s not as good as the real one.”
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts