That skyline also attests to Hong Kong's rapacious appetite for the new: Few examples of traditional Chinese or more recent colonial architecture stand outside of museums, while contemporary works by Norman Foster and I.
To date, this hopeful comparison has fallen down because Russians lack that heritage of civic faith that tinged the mind of even the most rapacious of America's tycoons.
When the federal government got involved in roads, it learned a lesson from the railways, where rapacious private railroad-builders had regularly put their own interests ahead of the country's.