Giant wheel cancelled

China’s commercial hub of Shanghai has abandoned plans to build a Ferris wheel that would have been the world’s tallest, a city official said Friday.

“The project has definitely been cancelled,” said the official from the North Bund Development Office, who gave only his surname, Du, because he was not authorized to speak to the media.

He said officials were instead looking for private investors to build an office tower on the site, just north of the famed riverfront Bund financial district.

Du gave no reason for the project’s cancellation, although it comes amid a widening investigation into misuse of city pension funds that has brought new scrutiny for a number of glitzy mega-projects.

Announced last May, the Ferris wheel was to have had a diameter of 170 metres and sit atop a 50-metre-tall entertainment complex housing a theatre and other attractions. A revolving restaurant was to have been attached to its support pillars 130 metres up.

The London Eye rises 137 metres above Britain’s capital and is currently the world’s tallest Ferris wheel.

However, that title could be challenged by a new Ferris wheel in the southern Chinese city of Nanchang that is purportedly 160 metres tall, the official Xinhua news agency has reported.