I first thought Global Times had it a bit mixed up.
Then I checked, and guess what.
The largest office building in the world is the Long’ao Building, Jinan, the capital of Shandong Province, with 370,000 sqm. It is used by the city government.
The Pentagon counts 600,000 sqm totally but only 340,000 sqm is used as office. The second runner up is in Bucharest, Romania, the Palace of Parliament, 330,000 sqm, built by the megalomaniac dictator Ceausescu; I visited that place last year and it is indeed gigantic and… looks pretty similar to the Jinan government office building.
It is one of those excesses of local government in China and received a lot of criticism on the Chinese Internet. The building’s cost: US$640 million. Never mind poor kids who have no decent schools. The office space for the “leaders” is well above the Chinese government norms. The good thing is, people talk about it and even Global Times. But you wonder why nobody mentioned it earlier: the monstrosity was completed in 2007. It took the media five years to “discover” it.
See the original article: http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/749633.shtml