beijing airport was impressive, to say the least. dimension-wise as well as in puncto tidiness, and at least from the latter those pictures should give an impression.

in europe it is common wisdom that societies with a socialist background usually have an enormous amount of hidden unemployment by entertaining low paid support jobs that would not exist in a pure capitalistic environment (don’t deduce from this statement that i would rate our capitalistic society higher – the last months have shown on which bubbles we have built). in beijing airport as well as on the streets of nanjing numerous amount of cleaning staff was re-cleaning clean things, to maintain the high gloss as here in beijing, or spotless clean motoways as in nanjing. impressive, but probably not a useful model for other parts of the world.

but as a billboard to the world, showcasing chinas prosperity and well-organisedness it presumably served the purpose.