
The Chinese government likes superlatives. When you travel around China, you often find the biggest, the tallest, the longest, the best of many categories, particularly in terms of infrastructure. Hardly surprising, the Great Wall of China is the largest and longest wall in the world. The International and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) is the largest bank, and biggest public company, in the world. The South China Mall is the largest shopping mall in the world, in terms of gross leasable area.
I have ridden the Tianmen Shan cable car, the world's longest cable car, from Zhangjiajie to Heaven's Gate mountain. It covers a distance of 7,455 meters and takes about 25 minutes one way. The Danyang-Kunshan Bridge from Shanghai to Nanjing in Jiangsu Province is the world's longest rail bridge. The world's highest bridge is also in China. The Beipanjiang Bridge in Guizhou Province is over 1800 feet high. The manmade Beijing Hangzhou Grand Canal is over 1,100 miles long, the longest canal in the world. The largest dam, and largest hydropower project, in the world is the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River.
Beijing's Capital Airport is currently the second largest in the world, behind Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. Not large enough. A new airport, called the Beijing New Airport, will open in 2019 and is slated to be the largest in the world.
China is the largest exporting country in the world, in part because it is the largest producer of many things:
- tin, zinc, mercury, manganese, steel, iron, cement, arsenic, aluminum, gold
- motor vehicles and tractors
- paper
- tobacco, tea, silk, cotton, grapes, mushrooms, onions, asparagus, lettuce, spinach, carrot, eggplant, peach, tangerine, tomato and rice, to name a few
Although China is the world's largest coal producer and is responsible for the most carbon dioxide emissions, it is also the largest wind turbine, wind power, hydroelectricity, renewable energy and solar panel producer. One only needs to take a train ride through the country to see the millions of acres of solar panel and wind farms to know that this superlative is duly earned.
China borders the most countries in the world (14): Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bhutan, Myanmar (Burma), Laos, North Korea and Vietnam.
Join a Chow Fun Tour and see some of the world's biggest, longest and largest in person!