Textiles, steel, iron, chemicals, tobacco, you name it, Huaxi has made it. It was a place where people have been farming for millenia, then around forty years ago when the country began modernizing it became a place for factories. Just forty years ago, Huaxi was a regular, run of the mill, podunk agricultural commune inauspiciously placed out in rural Jiangsu province. Though Huaxi’s journey from tilling the earth to scraping the sky was not typical in this least, and did not happen without controversy. But whatever the future may hold, Huaxi is what the Communist Party means when they talk about building a “new socialist countryside.” Huaxi is held up as a model of success for Chinese socialism, a system where every man, woman, and child is supposed to get rich off of the globalization epidemic and then revert into a true communist state where everybody will share the wealth. “One village, one man, one miracle,” is how Huaxi village is often summed up. In Chinese thought, 32 is associated with business and 8 represents prosperity - put them together and you can add on a layer of auspiciousness to one big, expensive, and very strange skyscraper. This height was not unintentional, as the number 328 is loaded with significance.

The skyscraper is 74 stories high, and tops out at 328 meters - the same size as the tallest building in Beijing. It is higher than the Eiffel Tower, New York’s Chrysler Building, everything in Tokyo, and will even top the Shard London Bridge, which is slated to be the tallest building in the EU when it is finished next year. The skyscraper is called the Zengdi Kongzhong, and it is currently the 40th tallest building in the world, the 15th largest in China. The skyscraper that I was looking at was a work which bookmarks a turning point in history, it was a monument in the truest form - a monument to globalization, capitalism, China’s rise to power, and, of course, the reworking of the socialist model. You almost come to expect such surrealist insanity after living in this country for a time, but this skyscraper was something above and beyond the usual Chinese altered-state. Who builds thousand foot high skyscrapers out in the middle of rural nowhere? The Chinese. It appeared almost as a mirage through the morning haze, and if I did not know about this colossal specimen of engineering before I set my sights upon it, I probably would have questioned if what I was seeing was real. In the early morning hours of a late summer day I looked out into the central Jiangsu plains, and there, amid the typical factories, agricultural fields, and small villages was an incredible skyscraper. I peered through the smoke that was being emitted from the twin smokestacks of a coal-fed power plant and saw something very much out of place rising in the distance. Huaxi Hanging Village rising in the distance

In this era, powerful cultures build skyscrapers. From the pyramids of Egypt to the ceremonial sites of the Maya and Aztec, from the Great Wall of China to Angor Wat, the Roman Colosseum to Stonehenge, when cultures become technologically sophisticated and powerful enough they tend to demonstrate this progress with gargantuan works of engineering. Throughout history various groups of humans have built monuments which show their prowess and power. Cabbage field, tree, chicken, skyscraper.

China skyscraper death