Richest village's monument to itself reaches for the sky

Huaxi to flaunt its wealth with a 72-storey building

The mainland's richest village is building a monument in the sky dedicated to itself - a 72-storey tower with a price tag of at least 1 billion yuan.

Huaxi village proclaims that the 300-metre high building falls under a central government policy of building a 'new socialist countryside', even though such a flaunting of wealth seems at odds with the drive to narrow the income gap between rural residents and urban dwellers.

But there are no dissenting voices in Huaxi, in Jiangsu province, near Shanghai, where past policies have made the villagers rich. Huaxi was the first village to have a gross domestic product of 10 billion yuan, reaching that mark in 2003.

'The building will allow us to reach the sky,' resident Wu Jianqing said.

Dubbed the 'New Countryside in the Sky', the building will have three towers linked by bridges with a massive sphere on top, offering more than 200,000 square metres of space. It will be surrounded by a man-made lake.

Officials claim the building will conserve land by providing homes for 400 families and the cost of the project will be borne by the villagers themselves as investors. But there are doubters, fuelled by a wave of negative publicity about local governments building luxurious buildings.