Opinion | Shandong city builds massive ‘Pentagon-size’ headquarters for 4b yuan
Government officials in Jinan, the capital of China’s Shandong province, certainly have an appetite for space.
The US Defence Department’s Pentagon is the only office building that’s bigger.
The “Long Ao building” has a floor area of 370,000 sq m. If you add up the lengths of all the corridors, you would have an exhausting one-kilometre walk. The building has more than 40 elevators and 45,000 telephone sockets, said media reports.
China’s netizens quickly pointed out on Tuesday that Jinan has spent only 180 million yuan trying to improve people’s livelihoods in poor counties and villages since 2003, a tiny number compared to its “Pentagon” budget.
“How many homeless people could have been fed with that money?” said one commenter on China’s micro-blogging service Sina Weibo.
“How did the budget get approved in the first place?” said another user.