Come September, the phoenix-shaped Beijing Daxing International Airport in China will be open. Touted to be the largest airport in the world, it was designed by late British architect Zaha Hadid. Final touches are being made. The $12billion project could attract traffic volumes close to that of the busiest airport in the world, Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in Atlanta.
Construction of the airport began in 2014 and rises from farmland 30 miles south of Beijing. The airport is in sync with Xi Jinping's plan to overtake the United States as the largest market by early- or mid-2020s.
According to transportation authorities, the country invested $120 billion and $12 billion in railways and civil aviation, respectively. The country had build a new airport terminal in 2008 before the Beijing Olympics and it covered about 200 football fields in floor space. The project cost about $4billion.
The number of Chinese fliers has been rising faster than airports can keep up. Annual passenger traffic reached 1.264 billion in 2018, up 10.2 percent from the previous year, "In the future, the area will be a hub for the flow of people, the flow of travels, the flow of physical goods, the flow of capital, and the flow of technology," said Cao Yunchun, a professor from the Institute of Airport Economics, Civil Aviation University of China in Tianjin.
(The story first appeared in The Week)
