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China news tagged with: Beijing airport (10)

• Photo: Reflections at the Beijing Airport, by frankartculinary

  

  

  Reflections at the Beijing Airport, by frankartculinary

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  • August 23, 2009 10:42 PM

• Former Beijing Airport Boss Executed in China

  

  AP has details of recent high-profile corruption cases:

  On Friday, the former head of the company that runs airports in Beijing and more than 30 other Chinese cities was put to death after the People’s Supreme Court upheld his sentence in a $16 million bribery and embezzlement case.

  Li Peiying’s execution came two days after word emerged that the head of China’s nuclear power program was under investigation for alleged corruption. Just last month, the former chairman of China’s second-biggest oil company, Sinopec, was also convicted of taking $29 million in bribes and given a suspended death sentence.

  The heads of state-owned enterprises “possess power and money, making it easy to give rise to corruption,” Wang Yukai of the China National School of Administration was quoted Friday in the Communist Party newspaper Global Times as saying.

  China has long struggled against corruption among high-level Communist Party officials, hoping high-profile takedowns will help scare the rank and file straight.

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  • August 7, 2009 10:30 AM

• Documentary: World’s Biggest Airport – Beijing Capital International Airport

  

  Discovery Channel’s documentary “Beijing Airport” tells the story of why and how China vowed to build the world’s biggest airport in Beijing, posted by Chinasuperpower via Youtube. Below is a description of the airport from Wikipedia:

  Beijing Capital International Airport is the main international airport of Beijing, China. It is located 32 km northeast of Beijing’s city center in an enclave of Chaoyang District that is surrounded by rural Shunyi District. The airport is owned and operated by the Beijing Capital International Airport Company Limited, a state-controlled company. The airport’s IATA Airport Code, PEK, is based on the city’s former romanized name, Peking.

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  • February 2, 2009 9:21 PM

• Photo: The new Terminal 3 at Beijing Airport

  

  

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  • March 6, 2008 9:56 PM

• Beijing Opens Massive Airport Terminal

  

  A Los Angeles Times reporter describes the new Beijing airport: “It is two miles long, half a mile wide and expected to handle more passengers than any in the world. And it was built fast — in time for the Summer Olympics.”

  …Beijing’s new international air terminal, which opened today in time for the Summer Olympics surge, attracts and embodies superlatives. It also embodies the new China, a country racing headlong into the future fueled by an economy on fire.

  The airy glass-and-steel structure, even at two miles long and half a mile wide, raced from design to takeoff in four years. Most airport projects take a decade or more to complete and usually involve lengthy reviews, detailed assessments, planning committees, public hearings and environmental impact statements…

  Elsewhere across China, skyscrapers sprout, highways unfurl and dams appear at breakneck speed, cutting through neighborhoods and displacing millions of people in the process. This terminal is among about $40 billion worth of projects being built in Beijing alone in advance of the Games, which start Aug. 8.

  See also the Telegraph blog: Beijing’s amazing airport

  Here is CCTV’s news on the Beijing No. 3 terminal via Youtube:

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  • February 29, 2008 11:30 PM

• Sleeping Dragon Awakes — At World’s Newest Airport

  

  Beijing’s new airport terminal has opened to much media acclaim. From The Age:

  The terminal, built by 50,000 workers in four years after 10 villages were flattened, will increase Beijing Airport’s annual capacity from 35 million passengers to 85 million and make it one of the world’s five busiest airports.

  The new terminal alone is almost 20% bigger than all five terminals combined at London’s Heathrow Airport.

  Built partly as one of the architectural centrepieces of the 2008 Olympic Games — which open in Beijing on August 8 — it also reflects the explosive demand in air travel as Chinese citizens grow richer and are able to travel freely in ways unimaginable even two decades ago.

  A commentary in the Independent compares the experience of building the new Beijing terminal to that of the soon-to-open terminal five at Heathrow:

  Lord Foster makes the point succinctly: China has managed to design and build a new airport terminal twice the size of Heathrow’s Terminal Five in four years, less time than the Heathrow planning enquiry. He should know, for he has designed both terminals. China’s new terminal opens this week and Heathrow’s next month, but Beijing Capital airport differs in another respect. It has also, in the past four years, built a third runway, something that will clearly take somewhat longer here.

  It is worth making the comparison, not to argue simplistically that we are falling behind in some sort of global economic race, still less that we should adopt the Chinese planning model. There are lots of reasons why we shouldn’t, of which more in a moment. But it would be extremely arrogant of us not to note what China is doing, both to set in context our own economic debates and also to try to see what we can learn from Chinese experience. The very fact of employing a British architect for such a high-profile project shows China is prepared to learn from us. Why should we now try to learn from them?

  Read also “A Giant Airport for China’s Vast Ambition” from the BBC (see the video here). Watch a tour of the new terminal via ITN News:

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  • February 27, 2008 4:46 PM

• An Olympian Construction: Beijing’s New Departure in Air Travel

  

  The Independent looks inside Beijing’s new airport, touted as the world’s largest building:

  The newly wealthy citizens of a confident, powerful China will be treated to what is hailed as the world’s biggest building. Designed by Lord Foster and built by the British-based global engineer Arup, the terminal caters for a rapidly expanding middle-class in China, keen to exercise their new financial muscle by taking to the skies. The project was delivered in four years, less time than it took to start even drawing up the plans for Heathrow’s Terminal 5.

  Beijing’s reconstruction, and transformation, from a 14th-century capital centred around a cosmological axis and the Forbidden City, has been the most dramatic building project the world has seen in peacetime.

  And now it has its airport. It is stunning. A golden roof slopes gently above the glass and steel main structure, and the skylights dotting the top of the building are designed to let natural light into the terminal, which is just under two miles long. They look like the raised scales on a mythical dragon’s back.

  

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  • February 26, 2008 6:18 PM

• Rebuilding Beijing: Pure Geometry Versus the Awkward Squad – Hugh Pearman

  

  Architecture critic Hugh Pearman writes about the new buildings popping up in Beijing in preparation for the Olympics:

  Although Beijing is as big as you expect – a dauntingly gridlocked, teeming, dust-laden bigness – it is only the third largest city in China. It trails behind Guangzhou and Shanghai. But as the capital most likely to take over from Washington as the world’s effective centre of supreme power, Beijing has a hell of a swagger to it. And this is one reason why it’s such a joke that London is doing the Olympics in 2012. Because when you see what Beijing is doing for 2008, you wonder why we bother. [Full text]
  
  

  
  
  [Image: The new terminal at Beijing's Capital Airport, by Hugh Pearman]

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  • November 19, 2007 2:00 PM

• China Lifts the Lid on Foster’s New Airport – Jonathan Watts

  

  From Guardian Unlimited:

  It is about twice the size, half the cost and planned and built in almost a third of the time. When Beijing’s new airport terminal opens in February, comparisons with Heathrow’s Terminal 5 will be inevitable and not entirely flattering to London.

  The Chinese capital’s new gateway to the skies was given its first international airing today after a three-and-a-half-year sprint to construct the world’s biggest airport complex for next year’s Olympics. [Full Text]

  [Image: Two workers mop the floor in Beijing airport's newly-built Terminal Three. Photograph: Victor Liu/EPA, via Guardian Unlimited]

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  • September 13, 2007 7:17 AM

• China in mad rush to build more airports- Peter Harmsen

  

  From The Economic Times:
  

  In peak periods such as this week’s National Day holiday, when a fully loaded passenger jet lands or takes off at the Beijing Capital International Airport every minute, the strain begins to show.

  The airport has been a work in progress for most of the past decade, giving it the capability now to handle 35 million passengers a year, but it is still not enough, and it is involved in yet another expansion project. A third passenger terminal is being built, and once it stands ready in 2007, one year ahead of the Olympics, it will be able to process up to 60 million passengers annually, or the entire population of France.

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  • October 9, 2005 4:05 AM

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