With a generous infusion of Saudi Arabian cash, officials in Beijing are planning a $1.3 billion hotel inspired by the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, pictured. They hope the “seven-star” hotel will become a Beijing landmark, according to the Beijing Morning Post (via China Daily).
An unnamed Chinese official told AFP that the Saudis are to fund the entire hotel (whose seven stars are self-appointed, as no formal agency doles out more than five stars to hotels). It’s unknown whether the building will try to top the half-mile-tall (2,717 feet) Burj Khalifa.
Chinese leaders are no doubt hoping that their project involves no replay of the final stages of the Dubai project last January.
A few weeks after the several-times-delayed monster building finally opened to great fanfare, it closed abruptly: An elevator malfunction stranded tourists en route to the observation deck, the only part of the building open at the time. It didn’t reopen until April. And by the autumn, a mere 8 percent of the Burj Khalifa’s apartments were occupied. Rents had fallen by almost half.
Meanwhile, the tiny Middle Eastern nation plunged into a debt crisis.
There are some faint suggestions that the commercial real estate market in China could likewise be headed for a fall. A surge in skyscraper construction has some financial analysts warning that China is misallocating capital on showy projects and that the bubble will soon burst.
One Hong Kong-based analyst says there may be a correlation between the quest to build the world’s next tallest building and economic crises. “Is China building its way to a bubble?” analyst Andrew Lawrence wrote in a recent report, quoted by CNN. “It may have started with the Tower of Babel, but over the past 140 years, there appears to be an unhealthy correlation between building the world’s next tallest building and an impending financial crisis: New York 1930, Chicago 1974, Kuala Lumpur 1997 and Dubai 2010. The world’s tallest structures rarely stand alone, with skyscraper building booms coinciding with economic corrections.”
