Skyscrapers in China
For about twenty years China put up more tall buildings than everyone else on earth together. Then, in 2020 and 2021, Beijing wrote a ceiling into the planning rules and the race stopped.
How many there are
China has more than 3,000 completed buildings above 150 m and about half of every supertall on earth, meaning every building above 300 m. For most of the two decades after 2003 it finished more tall buildings than the rest of the world combined, and in 2016 alone it topped out 84 above 200 m. Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Wuhan, Chongqing and Tianjin hold most of them.
The tallest Chinese buildings
| Building | Place | Year | Height | Floors |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Shanghai Tower | Shanghai, China | 2015 | 632 m | 128 |
| Ping An Finance Center | Shenzhen, China | 2017 | 599 m | 115 |
Behind those two come Tianjin CTF Finance Centre and Guangzhou CTF Finance Centre at 530 m each, China Zun in Beijing at 528 m, and Wuhan Greenland Center at 476 m, cut down from a 636 m design. See also the tallest building in the world and what counts as supertall.
Shanghai Tower
Shanghai Tower is 632 m with 128 floors, finished in 2015 in the Lujiazui district of Pudong and designed by Gensler. It is the tallest building in China and third tallest anywhere. The shape turns 120 degrees from base to top, and the twist earns its keep: it cuts the wind load by about a quarter, so the structure needed less steel. A 1,000-tonne damper near the crown holds the sway down, and the top still moves about a meter in a storm.
The tower has two glass walls, an inner cylinder and an outer skin around it, with 21 atria stacked in the gap as buffers against Shanghai's winters and humid summers. Its elevators run at 20.5 m per second, the fastest in any building, reaching the 119th floor from the basement in 53 seconds. For why the sway matters, see how much tall buildings move.
Shenzhen, and the Ping An tower
Before 1979 Shenzhen was fishing villages and farmland across the border from Hong Kong. Beijing made it the first Special Economic Zone in 1980. About 18 million people live there now, and the city has roughly 470 buildings above 150 m, second only to Hong Kong. Forty years produced a skyline that took New York a century.
Ping An Finance Center, 599 m and 115 floors, opened in 2017 as the city's tallest. Its drawings called for a spire taking it to 660 m. Shenzhen Bao'an International Airport sits close enough that aviation authorities refused it, the spire came off, and the tower stopped one meter short of 600.
Why so many went up
Urban population grew by hundreds of millions between 1990 and 2020, so cities needed floor space fast, and land is leased by local governments, where a tower on a central plot returns far more revenue than a low block. A provincial capital with a supertall could also point at it when competing for headquarters, which made height a civic argument.
That last motive produced what the Council on Vertical Urbanism calls vanity height, the gap between the highest usable floor and the architectural top. About 42 percent of the Chinese supertalls in its study would have fallen below 300 m without that empty crown. The Pinnacle in Guangzhou carries 95 m of it.
The towers that stopped
Goldin Finance 117 in Tianjin is the clearest case. Designed at 597 m and 128 floors, it topped out structurally in 2015, then the developer ran out of money and the shell stood for years without glass or interiors. Work has restarted and stopped more than once. Wuhan Greenland Center sat on indefinite hold before it was finished short of its design, and other provincial towers were abandoned at foundation level in the credit squeeze after 2020. Finished towers had a quieter version of the problem: supertalls from the boom opened with high vacancy in cities that had approved several at once.
The 2020 and 2021 height cap
On 27 April 2020 the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development told local authorities to stop approving buildings above 500 m and to restrict anything above 250 m. In July 2021 the National Development and Reform Commission tightened it: no approvals above 500 m at all; above 250 m only under strict limits and only in cities with more than 3 million urban residents; a 150 m ceiling in smaller cities without special approval; and anything above 100 m has to match the local fire service's actual reach. Officials who sign off a project that breaks the rule are held accountable for life.
The stated reasons are safety, waste and copycat architecture. The timing points at one event too. On 18 May 2021 SEG Plaza in Shenzhen, a 356 m tower from 2000, began shaking at midday and around 15,000 people left within 90 minutes. There was no earthquake and the wind was only 27 km/h. Investigators found vortex-induced resonance: the two roof masts had deformed over twenty years into a shape the wind could excite. Removing them settled it, but footage of a swaying supertall circulated for weeks before the July rules appeared.
No Chinese building above 500 m has been approved since, and the last one to open was Ping An in 2017. China now builds in the 200 m to 300 m band, and the race for height moved to the Gulf. The skyscraper cities page has the city rankings.