Recently in Changsha, Hunan Province, "Sky City," invested in and built by the Broad Group and billed as taller than Dubai's Burj Khalifa, the "world's tallest building" in the UAE, was halted by the relevant authorities just four days after construction began because it had not completed the required statutory construction approval procedures. For a time, the topic of the "world's tallest building" sparked heated discussion, and behind that discussion lies a question for reflection: does China need so many skyscrapers?

　　According to statistics, 87% of the skyscrapers under construction worldwide are in China. Among the top 20 tallest buildings in the world, 10 belong to China. Experts' research found that if all these buildings are completed, then in the next three years China will complete an average of one skyscraper every five days, and five years from now China will have more than 800 skyscrapers, four times the total number the United States has today.

　　The craze for building tall buildings actually began in New York in the 1930s, when the city built hundreds of skyscrapers; the Empire State Building, later famous worldwide, was completed during that period and held the title of "world's tallest building" for 40 years. Then in the 1960s, Tokyo, Japan, also set off a boom in high-rise construction. Japan's economy was expanding rapidly at the time, accelerating the Japanese people's boundless desire for and pursuit of status and prestige, which drove one skyscraper after another to rise in Shinjuku, Tokyo.

　　In different eras, people's desire for tall buildings and their purposes are the same: they all want to display their country's or city's strong economic strength and level of science and technology. The ceaseless construction of one skyscraper after another is not only a way to show off the impressive achievements of human industrial civilization and science and technology, but also an attempt to display the economy, wealth and fashion of the country and city.

　　However, compared with the United States and Japan in their day, China's current "high-rise impulse" has a different flavor. If New York in the 1930s needed tall buildings to demonstrate its economic and technological strength, and Japan in the 1960s used high-rise construction to prove its postwar recovery, then the rush to build skyscrapers in major Chinese cities today is a kind of "nouveau riche" showmanship and, moreover, a sign of insecurity, because skyscrapers are no longer the sole symbol of technology, advanced development, fashion and strength; this model has become outdated. It is like many "fashionable" people in the early 1980s carrying dual-cassette recorders, turning up the volume and showing off as they walked down the street—the recorders they carried were all obsolete foreign products at the time.

　　We need tall buildings. In major cities around the world such as New York, Tokyo, Hong Kong and Shanghai, with population growth and economic development, there is indeed a need to build high-rises to meet various demands and better improve land utilization and other factors. But a city like Changsha, whose own scale and level of development are not yet sufficient, actually has no need or necessity to build the "world's tallest building." Trying to create a "calling-card effect" by building the "world's tallest building" and leaving people with an impression of the city [latest news, prices, unit layouts, reviews] is a naive way of thinking. What leaves a lasting impression about a city is not that it has the "world's tallest building," but its urban planning, transportation, environment and other public services, and even more so the spirit and quality of its people.

　　What the regulators halted this time is not just a "world's tallest building"; what they halted is a way of thinking, and even more so the restless mentality of Chinese society today.