Taiwan Moving to Enjoy the Fruits of Its Boom : Development: World’s tallest skyscraper on the drawing board--and “the money is not a problem,” an official said.

Newly rich Taiwan wants it all, the world’s tallest building, its own Las Vegas and a Statue of Liberty with a laser-beam torch and a planetarium in its head.

After decades of penny-pinching, Taiwan’s cash-flush planners are joyfully freeing some of their wilder dreams in the name of progress.

“It’s no problem for us to make these kind of ideas come true,” said Jeff Chia, an official in the Taipei mass-transit development office. “The money is not a problem, anyway.”

Chia is behind the plan to erect a 126-story skyscraper in the middle of Taipei, a low-slung conglomeration of concrete apartment blocks described by one guide book as “a drab and polluted city of 2.2 million.”

The proposed spire would top Chicago’s 110-story Sears Tower as the world’s tallest office building and would tower over Taipei’s current tallest building by a neat 100 stories.

The $770-million plan, one of two finalists for a development project linked to Taipei’s new rapid-transit system, would require heavy private investment. It is now in the final planning stages and requires approval from the mayor’s office.

But the plan is not without its critics.

Many say Taipei has no business building the tallest building in the world when it has not solved basic problems such as traffic, housing and sanitation, despite years of strong economic expansion and trade surpluses.

Some, citing Taiwan’s frequent typhoons and the city’s precarious position atop the Pacific earthquake belt, say the plan is simply unworkable.

But Taiwan’s civil engineers are unlikely to be put off by the quibbles of naysayers such as these.

With export earnings of $73 billion a year--more than any other country except Japan--Taiwan’s 20 million people can be forgiven for thinking nothing is impossible.

Taiwan is in the midst of a feverish building boom, sprouting ornate office and residential complexes with names such as “Eternal Atom Tycoon,” “Oriental Technopolis” and “Heineken Holiday Gardens.”

To give executives and homemakers in these flashy developments a flashy place to play, Taipei’s director of public works has come up with the idea of building a “Taiwan Las Vegas.”

Developer Pan Li-man was very impressed with the real Las Vegas, and now he wants to duplicate the gambling mecca on a muddy islet in Taipei’s Tanshui River.

On a higher moral plane altogether is the campaign to build a new Statue of Liberty in the southern port city of Kaohsiung.

“Taiwan is liberty island for all Chinese,” said financier Susan Saga Chen, the main force behind the project.

Like the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor, the Asian model would stand 152 feet tall. The Taiwan statue would be made of the molded metal used to build airplanes and inside the body there would be an aquarium, a movie theater, a restaurant and an exhibition hall.