Impossible Builds: China's Ice World (Blink Films, PBS, c. 2018)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I switched on an Impossible Builds episode – the show’s very title is a misnomer because the buildings it depicts have actually been built and therefore weren’t “impossible,” but I guess Very Difficult Builds wouldn’t have had quite the same ring to it, just as Meyerbeer’s opera Robert le Diable is really about the son of the Devil through a liaison with a mortal woman, but Robert le Fils du Dlable wouldn’t have been as effective a title. This one was about the Ice World, or more fully the Deep Pit Ice and Water World in the Dawang Mountain Resort Area in Shangcha, China. The project was originally planned in the early 2010’s as a flying saucer-shaped building vaulted over an old limestone quarry in Shangcha, and funded by unnamed “investors.” Just who these” investors” were, where they got their money (remember that China is still officially a “Communist” country and therefore the distinction between “public” and “private” enterprise is far more blurred there than it is here, and virtually every major construction project, no matter how nominally “private,” has some funding and logistical support from the Chinese government) and how they got their project green-lighted were issues the producers of this program couldn’t have cared less about. Instead the show was about the bizarre engineering challenges of building a huge (several hundred thousand tons) structure on top of so notoriously soft and porous a material as limestone. What made it even more complicated was that Shangcha is located in monsoon country, and that meant the limestone pit kept filling up with water, which not only had to be pumped out before they could even start excavating for a foundation, but it threatened to erode the sides of the pit and thereby make the site even more unstable.

It also kept filling even as they were trying to dig, which meant that they had to install pumps to drain the water (though where they pumped it to remained a mystery) and also to excavate the muddy soil left behind by the rains (again, when they dug it out, where did they take it? It’s a solid object and they had to move it somewhere!). They also had to redesign the building, changing it from their original flying saucer-like design above the limestone canyon to one literally built into the rock itself, using the canyon walls as part of the bracing. They had a model – a luxury hotel being built into the side of another old quarry in China – and they redesigned their building accordingly. The plan included a giant indoor ski slope at an 18° angle (which would make it fairly gentle and relatively unchallenging for beginners), with a water sports park with a giant outdoor pool built on top of the artificial ski slope. Also, since mountain (as opposed to cross-country) skiing is associated mainly with the Alps, the giant indoor ski slope would be ringed with little shops and other spaces given an Alpine-themed design. Once again I was watching a program about a preposterous building being built as a plaything for the rich – the Ice World and water-sports park were being accompanied by a giant hotel overlooking the site (which was built fairly easily because it was on solid ground without the nightmarish complications of building inside a quarry) – and lamenting that this amount of money and human capital wasn’t being expended on affordable housing instead.

Despite the oppression Chinese suffered under Mao Zedong’s (to use the current Roman-alphabet spelling of the man we used to know as Mao Tse-Tung) rune from 1949 to 1976 – not only the usual shit from living under a dictator but some peculiarly Maoist tortures, like en masse firings of professors, artists and other intellectuals who were rounded up, trucked to the countryside and forced to become farmworkers – Mao did achieve the goal of relative economic equality. Alas, under Mao’s successor Deng Xiaoping and the people who’ve run China since – including the current president-for-life, Xi Jinping (who gave himself that title just before meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump, whose response was predictable: “President for life? That sounds like a good idea to me”), China has swung from being one of the most economically equal to one of the most economically unequal countries on earth, and like every other country in history that has adopted capitalism (whether by moving forward from feudalism or backwards from socialism), it has acquired a tiny class of super-rich people who basically run things to benefit themselves no matter what the rest of the population needs, wants or cares. One thing I noticed about the Ice World is that they’re running it more like a theme park than a resort; there’s a ticket gate at the front entrance where you pay admission (unlike the usual practice of ski resorts, where you rent a room and that price gives you access to the amenities) and the hotel next to it is like the Disneyland Hotel: you can stay there or not and use the park, but you have to pay a separate fee for it.

Once again, a lot of time and human energy are being used to create a preposterous playground for the rich instead of creating large-scale housing for the rest of humanity, but somehow that didn’t bother me as much as the previous Impossible Builds episode on the so-called “skinny skyscraper” in the middle of New York City right next to Central Park, where the apartments will cost $57 million. That one seemed like a gratuitous insult to New York’s homeless and nearly homeless people, a giant “finger” to them. It reminded me of the exchange that ends Wagner’s opera Das Rheingoid, in which the gods are about to move into the splendid new resort of Valhalla, paid for by the Rhinegold which was stolen from the Rhinemaidens. The god Loge (Loki in the original Norse myths) taunts them, saying, “Gleams no more on you maidens the gold, in the newborn godly splendor bask ye henceforth in bliss!” The Rhinemaidens reply, “Tender and true 'tis but in the waters: false and base are all who revel above!,” while Wagner’s magnificent music drips with hypocrisy under its superficial grandiosity. Wagner wrote both that music and those words in Switzerland in the late 1840’s and early 1850’s, during his 16-year exile from Germany for participating in the 1848 revolutions that sought to overthrow Europe’s monarchies and institute democracy – he was a personal friend of anarchist Mikhail Bakunin – and the ending of Rheingold is a passage I often think of when I watch modern-day media and super-rich people are held up as the exemplars of humanity, as if we poor peons have a duty to work ourselves to death and accept less and less while they make more and more.

The Impossible Builds projects seem to go out of their way to enforce the Libertarian view of economics and humanity – the idea that rich people are superior just because they are rich, and funding a social-welfare state or doing anything to make rich people help not-so-rich people is not only bad social policy but morally wrong. I don’t know how seriously the modern-day ultra-Rich take Libertarian philosophy (though one who did was the recently deceased David H. Koch, who not only funded Libertarian think tanks but literally bought for himself the 1972 vice-presidential nomination of the Libertarian Party before he realized that, given America’s two-party duopoly, he was going to do a better job buying his way into the Republican Party than chasing the will-o’-the-wisp of an alternative party) – my husband Charles insists they don’t and all they care about is enriching themselves – but it’s become clear that America’s (and the world’s) current ruling classes are committed to making themselves richer and the rest of us poorer, and mega-projects like the ones depicted in Impossible Builds are their way not only of doing that but unashamedly showing themselves to the world and saying, “We’re going to take more and more of the world’s wealth and resources, and there ain’t a damned thing you can do to stop us!”