I had seen photos of it before. From above it had looked like a spaceship had landed in the outskirts of Beijing and forgotten to turn off its parking lights. Photos of its interior showcased a glittering future with all-encompassing windows towering up to a snow-white mesh ceiling.
As we pulled up in our cab to Beijing Capital International Airport for the first time, I couldn’t help but be stunned. It really did exist, as airy, spacious, and beautiful as the photos had suggested. Undulating ceilings rolled high over the massive 11-million-square-foot terminal creating a sense that its piers docked with hundreds of jets stretched into infinity.
Shanghai’s Pu Dong airport is similarly monumental, with a huge parabola of a roof improbably held up by a series of delicate metal beams that shoot out from the ground. The terminal stretches on forever. Need to get into town in a hurry? Don’t worry. The airport’s magnetic levitation train will whisk you 19 miles into Shanghai in a mere seven minutes.
Sophisticated, monumental, and modern, these airports are monoliths devoted to state capitalism. All of the benefits of China’s ballistic ascent since the inception of economic liberalization are on display on the enormous facades of these buildings and the queued international jetliners encircling their peripheries. In the shadows of these buildings, all of the predictions about China’s coming domination of the world seem inevitable. The Chinese model of state-controlled capitalism suddenly seems to hold an irresistible allure.
Even as I marveled at the scale and style of the architecture, though, I quickly began to feel that something was amiss as I wandered through these airports on several occasions. It was clear that the glossy facades and sophisticated interior architecture were meant to present a dynamic, strong, and modern China to the world. It was also clear that they hadn’t gotten it quite right. The devil was in the details.
Whether you’re transiting through these airports or they are your point of entry or exit, the first thing you notice is an almost complete lack of information on how to navigate these labyrinthine structures. As I groped my way around Pu Dong airport, trying to figure out how to transfer to my next flight, there wasn’t a sign or placard anywhere describing where I was supposed to go. My wife and I had to speak with three different people before we could figure it out.
It turned out that in order for us to transfer from one international flight to another in the same exclusively international terminal, we had to go through immigrations and customs and then come back into the exact same section of the building that we had just left. In the process we ran into a few other bewildered passengers in the same quandary.
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