“County government offices are built like the American White House, city squares are larger than Tiananmen Square, the interiors of government guesthouses are sumptuously decorated,” an article said in People’s Daily.

“Luxury buildings are built to satisfy the pompous selfish desires of certain people, but they have hurt the feelings of the common people,” it said.

…

The People’s Daily article failed to mention that the newspaper is also building ostentatious new headquarters in Beijing, which - having already attracted widespread ridicule - will feature a helipad.

[Source]

© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: austerity, Beijing, construction, government spending, local government, people's daily, Xi Jinping
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Sixty-seven people have been confirmed dead and 731 others injured after multiple earthquakes struck a mountainous region in southwest China on Friday, authorities said.

[…] Two quakes measuring 5.7 and 5.6 on the Richter scale hit a border area near Yiliang in Yunnan and Weining county in Guizhou province at 11:19 a.m. and 12:16 p.m. Friday, respectively.

[…] Yunnan’s civil affairs department said the quakes destroyed 6,650 houses and damaged 430,000 others. More than 100,000 residents have been evacuated and 100,000 others are in need of relocation.

Wen Jiabao quickly set off to visit the affected area, while Hu Jintao urged immediate relief efforts, Xinhua added.

Although the quakes were of only moderate strength, the area’s mountainous terrain and relative poverty magnified their impact. Landslides increased the destruction and blocked roads, slowing access to remote communities where Xinhua warned that further casualties may yet be discovered. In addition, poorly constructed rural buildings were particularly susceptible to the tremors. From Reuters:

Many structures in the area are built with mud and timber, making them more prone to collapse, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies said.

“On the other hand, extricating people trapped in these structures may be easier than from under concrete/brick homes, meaning that there could be many more injuries proportionate to the number of deaths,” it said.

In 2008, about 87,600 people were killed in the southwestern province of Sichuan when a 7.8 magnitude earthquake hit. Many of the victims died in the rubble of homes and schools built without adequate steel reinforcement.

One elementary school reportedly collapsed on Friday, killing three students and trapping others.

A Global Times editorial commented that the extent of the damage, like a stream of food safety scandals and the recent collapse of a months-old bridge in Harbin, exposed the limits of China’s development and “shattered illusions of growth”:

A quake as strong as Friday’s, which was measured at 5.7 on the Richter scale, could have caused fewer or even no casualties in a more developed region.

It once again served as a reminder that China has far from having completed its modernization process. The country as a whole is still prone to calamities that prey on its weaker aspects. Three decades of fast development have ushered China into the great cause of modernization, but that time was merely the beginning.

Many poorly constructed houses could not withstand the quake and were reduced to rubble. People who have illusions about China’s national strength have to wake up to the fact that many people still live in houses with similar conditions. It is impossible for them to be immediately relocated to safer ones any time soon.

[…] China should seek fast and quality development at the same time. The safety of lives is at the core of such an ideology. Houses, bridges and food should be safer and that’s where modernization should be unswervingly headed.

The editorial’s criticism of development that places face over safety echoes widespread anger at Beijing’s ill-preparedness for heavy flooding in July.

See also video reports from the BBC and from CNN:

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 2008 Sichuan earthquake, bridge collapse, buildings, construction, development, earthquake relief, earthquakes, food safety, Global Times, Hu Jintao, infrastructure, Red Cross, schools, Wen Jiabao, Xinhua, Yunnan
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Though some critics argue the Chinese government has been too slow to act, research, public concern and some hefty bills ($35 billion in Shanghai alone in the last 40 years), has sparked some momentum. Recently, the state council approved China’s Land Subsidence Prevention Project, a countrywide initiative to prevent land subsidence. Likewise, Beijing, which has descended more than a foot in the past decade, has also made an effort to reduce underground water extraction, with plans to close 800 water extraction wells in 2012, according to the Beijing Water Authority. By 2014, the city hopes to halt underground water extraction in urban areas altogether as part of the North-South Water Diversion Project. The project expects to bring 3 billion cubic feet of water supply to Beijing from the Yangtze River. This would not only satisfy one-third of the city’s total water demand, but would also cut the extraction of underground water in half.

But Li, who worked at the Chinese Academy of Science for 15 years, says such programs will not be enough. “It’s hard to quantify how much this might help, but the question is, is that a problem solved? The answer is no. The problem lies in the early issue with urbanization,” he says. Scientists expect the regulations to help curb the consumption of underground water supplies, but there a few things the government has less control over, such as global warming. As the land degradation and excessive guzzling of ground water continues, environmentalists predict waters surrounding Shanghai to rise 9 to 27 inches by 2050 as a result of melting ice caps.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Beijing, construction, Shanghai, south-to-north water diversion project, urban development, water conservancy, water crisis, water shortage, Yangtze River
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There are no highways running through this impoverished rural county. Children study in dilapidated schoolhouses. On many streets, you’re just as likely to run into a chicken as you are a pedestrian.

Yet the Wangjiang local government is constructing a headquarters on a slab of land the size of the Pentagon building — a sprawling edifice of granite and glass with a $10-million price tag in a county where the average resident earns $639 a year ….

It’s a common phenomenon in China. Like teenagers with their first credit card, local officials armed with cheap state loans and money from land sales are splurging on lavish projects of dubious value.

In growth-obsessed China, officials’ careers are judged by how well they meet development targets set by Beijing. The easiest and fastest way to juice growth figures is to borrow money and build something. The grander the edifice or attraction, the thinking goes, the more authority it projects.

The article catalogues projects ranging from a hotel shaped like a ping-pong bat (accompanied by stadiums modelled on various balls (not to scale)) to the world’s tallest mechanical clock tower. See also the monstrous offices of the Yinchuan Transportation Bureau, the empty city of Ordos, and the Versailles-like edifice constructed by a Harbin pharmaceutical SOE. These projects often fuel land disputes (see CDT coverage here), which are the trigger for an estimated two-thirds or more of the tens of thousands of “mass incidents” in rural China each year.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: construction, credit abuse, local government, vanity projects
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According to our investigation over recent months, one-third of the reinforcing steel used in this project so far was purchased by 9th Metallurgical from Jintang (金堂), Guanghan (广汉) and other small steel works, and substandard steel materials such as the “inferior steel” (地调钢) that is expressly forbidden by the state are being used [in the project]. This reinforcing steel product does not carry a steel manufacturing number from the producer, and what’s more it has not product quality certification (产品合格证), and all of it was brought on to the construction site at Wanda Plaza in the middle of the night.

The Mianyang Wanda Plaza project is massive, with a construction area of 450,000 square meters. There are a total of seven processing areas for reinforcing steel, and each of these has massive quantities of poor-quality steel. According to our careful estimates made through undercover work, we found that this steel falls below national quality standards — for example 10mm steel reinforcements, which are nationally limited to no less than 9.6mm, are only 8mm at this project site (please see the photographs following this letter).

The final picture shows local offices of the main contractor on the project. A banner features the slogan, “China State Construction Engineering Corp: Quality is Weightier than Mount Tai”.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 2008 Sichuan earthquake, construction, investigative journalism, Sichuan, steel
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… I asked why the doors were rotting in the first place after only four years. He laughed harder this time.

“When I renovated this house, the landlord only wanted to pay for materials that would last five years, because his lease—from the landlord above him—only lasts five years. So when it came to choosing the metal and the wood and the details, we only bought materials that would last for five years.”

In the spirit of Beijing these days, it had a certain logic. We often see houses in the neighborhood demolished and rebuilt in the course of a few weeks, so it’s not much of a stretch to imagine the lifetime of a house in terms of a few years. Chinese friends who are among the wave of new homeowners these days often complain that their buildings look decrepit after five years.

Americans who are weary of Washington dysfunction often remark, after a whirlwind visit to China, that the country seems to take a longer view of things by building new airports and highways and laying grand plans. That is true on the most high-profile projects, but that aphorism has always conformed more to our imagined notions of China than to the details of day-to-day life. Step closer, and China’s breakneck speed has its liabilities, whether it’s in the construction of a railway or a house in an alley.

For another view of modern China through the lens of home maintenance, see Xujun Eberlein’s ‘Who is the Guilty Party?‘, via CDT.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: airport, construction, demolition, development, highway
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While the United States, Europe and Japan remain mired in sluggish recovery, China’s economy has continued to boom. But serious questions are now surfacing about China’s own state-led economic management. Massive overcapacity in infrastructure, stubbornly high inflation and a pile of potentially bad bank loans are undermining historic economic reforms only half completed.

Chinese planners face a serious dilemma – should they continue with investment-led growth, or finally focus on building a robust middle class, a policy nearly a decade overdue. Either choice will have global implications.

Staying the course with investment focusing heavily on construction has starved other parts of the economy, costing the average Chinese citizen dearly. Forced relocation, runaway environmental degradation, and cash-strapped social programmes like education, healthcare, and social security systems have been tolerated for questionable projects, many with little practical use.

© alicebirney for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: bank lending, China's Middle class, Chinese state-owned comanies, construction, real estate bubble
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The former head of a district construction authority was sentenced to jail for 16 years yesterday in Shanghai on graft charges, highlighting the conclusion of a trial over last November’s high-rise inferno that killed 58 people ….

A total of 26 people were charged in the case, and 23 are headed to jail ….

The Shanghai No. 2 Intermediate People’s Court found that unlicensed welders employed by the project contractor caused the fire when stray sparks from their equipment ignited materials on scaffolding around the building. But the welders were given reprieves by the court. One of them, Wu Guolue, charged with major accident liability, was sentenced to jail for one year with a two-year reprieve. The other, Wang Yongliang, was exempted from criminal punishment ….

In addition to the criminal offenses, 28 officials and company workers received Party or administrative penalties.

See also CDT posts on the fire itself and reactions to it from Han Han, the public and the government.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: bribery, construction, fire, Shanghai
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“Poor quality, improper design or installation or maintenance of the glass door and the scorching weather are all possible causes for the incident,” said Lu Jinlong of the Shanghai Research Institute of Building Sciences.

Similar glass “explosions” or glass “bombs” falling off sides of high-rises have occurred frequently in the city during the past weeks, prompting concerns about the glass materials’ safety. A piece of glass on the 38th floor in the Shanghai International Finance Center broke into pieces on Wednesday ….

Meanwhile, a piece of glass in the One Lujiazui office tower broke on Monday, two months after a glass-shattering incident there damaged dozens of cars.

A glass platform barrier in Metro Line 10 suddenly exploded on Tuesday. An identical shield also shattered in Metro Line 11 on July 14.

And from Global Times on Friday:

Skyscraper owners and managers held the prime responsibility for the glass in their glass buildings, Deputy Mayor Shen Jun announced at a press conference on Wednesday.

“The city government must step up its efforts to prevent such accidents to minimize economic losses as well as injuries to residents,” he also said ….

The rate of exploding glass was about two windows in a 1,000, according to Fang, “too high odds to be ignored” for a metropolis like Shanghai ….

“The country’s technical standard does not meet that of the World Trade Organization,” Lu [Jinlong, also quoted by the Shanghai Daily] said.

“Although that does not necessarily mean that the glass walls are of poorer quality than those built by other more developed countries, Shanghai’s skyscrapers need more efficient and thorough safety checks to examine the glass walls’ quality.”

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: accidents, buildings, construction, safety, Shanghai, skyscrapers, world trade organization
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China’s heightened interest in saving energy — a response to electricity shortages and blackouts this year as well as longer-term security worries about dependence on energy imports — comes as the country’s construction industry continues to barrel ahead at a breathtaking pace. Last year, China consumed eight times as much cement as the world’s second-largest consumer, India, and it now leads the world in consumption of steel and other industrial materials by wide margins.

With 13 million to 21 million rural people in China migrating to cities each year — a number comparable to the 18.9 million people in metropolitan New York — the real estate industry has been putting up office towers and apartment buildings at a brisk pace but often with little regard for energy efficiency.

Chinese estimates show that the country’s commercial office buildings use 10 to 20 percent less electricity per square meter than comparable Western buildings. But the savings tend to come not from better designs but from thermostats set as high as 26 degrees Celsius (79 Fahrenheit) in summer and as low as 18 degrees (64 Fahrenheit) in winter.

Senior executives in the glass manufacturing and other material industries said that Chinese construction companies had long chosen low-cost, less insulated materials because buildings in China tended to change hands so frequently that owners seldom looked at long-term paybacks from electricity savings.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: construction, energy efficiency, energy shortage, green building, sustainable development
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When China’s Covec construction firm won the bid to build two sections of Poland’s main east-west highway two years ago, it seemed like a win-win situation for everyone involved. The cash-strapped Polish government would get new highways built in time for next summer’s European football championships at rock bottom prices. China, in turn, could use Poland as a springboard to break into Europe’s construction sector ….

China Overseas Engineering Group is a subsidiary of China Railway Group, one of Asia’s largest construction and engineering companies, and won a 2009 tender to build 50km of the highway – becoming the first Chinese company to win such a large European contract.. Covec’s bid was astonishingly low, coming in at less than 50 per cent of the 2.8bn zlotys ($1bn) that the government had budgeted ….

The Chinese company last week tried to renegotiate the contract, saying that raw materials were unexpectedly expensive and that it had been unfairly treated, but the government rejected the bid as it could have opened the way for similar renegotiations from companies building hundreds of kilometres of new roads around the country.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: China Railway Group, construction, Europe, road construction
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Changsha-based Sany Group Co. says its 62-meter truck-mounted concrete pump, used to build some of the world’s tallest skyscrapers, is on its way to Fukushima at the request of Tokyo Electric Co., or Tepco. The plan, according a statement posted on Sany’s website, is to use the machine to pump water toward Tepco’s reactor No. 4.

Already well known in the construction industry, Sany is making a name for itself in disaster relief as well – partly with its own stream of press releases.

A huge crane Sany built was instrumental in the rescue of Chilean miners last year. The Chinese company also claims a role in rescuing Colombians trapped in mud). On the domestic front, the company sent a team to the site of Sichuan’s 2008 earthquake to help clear roads and extract survivors from the rubble.

Sany says the truck sent to Japan, originally ordered by a Saudi client and worth roughly $1 million, is being sent free of charge to the nuclear plant and was requested personally by Tepco President Masataka Shimizu. “Since the break out of Japan’s nuclear crises in Fukushima nuclear power station, the determination and the strong will of Japanese people have touched the whole world,” the Sany statement said.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 2008 Sichuan earthquake, construction, Japan earthquake 2011, mining accidents
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Those charged include local government officials, construction company heads, construction supervisors, and welders who lacked the proper qualifications, according to the China Daily newspaper. The welders are blamed for causing the Nov. 15 blaze by ignoring safety precautions.

Investigators found a construction company failed safety checks but won the contract for the project after bribing officials, the reports said.

China’s work safety chief has blamed the fire on illegal contracting, unsafe materials and poorly supervised, unqualified workers.

The fire swept through the 28-story building after welding sparks set alight nylon netting and bamboo scaffolding set up as part of an exterior renovation. Most of the victims were overcome by smoke, toxic fumes and heat and died inside their own homes. Another 71 people were injured.

Read more about the fire from CDT.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: bribery, construction, fire, Shanghai
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Thought I’d take a break from recording people’s personal stories to describe the scenes one might expect while on a road trip in China. After all, a fair proportion of my time the last three months was spent staring out of bus and train windows. The scenery, though changing over different terrains, various climate zones and thousands of kilometers is, in a way, always the same: that of a construction site.

There is so much talk about China’s real estate market, about construction craze and developers and whether it is real growth or just a big fat bubble. Traveling through China doesn’t provide an answer to the “bubble or not” question but it does give a real sense of what the papers talk about when they talk about a housing boom.

Nowhere so far has this been more evident than in Jiangxi. For miles and miles and miles, on the highway between the provincial capital Nanchang and the southern city of Ji’an, there is nothing but new apartment blocks in different stages of construction or occupation, as one town merges into the other. Rice fields appear and disappear again between the cranes, and at the edge billboards advertise attractive real-estate investments. Seeing all this mile after mile, one can easily believe the reports talking about 64 million empty apartments hidden behind this country’s spectacular growth, because, frankly, how are all these rural Jiangxi compounds ever going to be occupied? By whom?

In villages, also, there is unceasing real estate activity. Mud shacks are being replaced by sturdier, more comfortable, bigger houses that lack any rural charm. Fashion changes in architecture as in any other field so the trend of covering outer walls with bathroom-like white or blue tiles is finally, thankfully, on its way out, making way for a lot of cutesy pastels in towns and exposed red bricks in the villages (you can pretty accurately guess the financial situation of a rural family or estimate how much someone has saved working in Shenzhen just by looking at the size and outer walls of the house they are building. If savings went well, it’ll be colorful panels. The less fortunate will have to do with exposed bricks or just exposed concrete).

I am now around the 6000-kilometer, three-month mark, and have during this period passed probably hundreds of settlements, big and small, rural or urban. Construction was happening in all of them without exception. It might sound like a bit of an exaggeration but it is just plain fact. Between living in Beijing and traveling around, I can’t remember the last time I woke up to any other sound than that of a chainsaw.

That is, until I got to Jinggangshan, a serene mountainous enclave of communist mythology in West Jiangxi. But more on that, in the next post.

*Rachel’s self-introduction:

I came to China for three months, with a plan to see a bit of Tibet and Sichuan and to get a taste of rural life in this country before I settled down back home with a job at a law firm. Nearly eight years later, I am still in China, and still as fascinated with its rural areas.

After working as a correspondent in Beijing for two years, in July 2010 I have embarked on what I hope will be a six month journey through the Chinese countryside — listening, watching and telling stories from farmers’ lives. Much has been and is still being written about the “Chinese miracle” (or dystopia, depends on your point of view) and this will only be my added two cents. China, it is often said, has more than 400 million Internet users and hundreds of millions of new urban residents, who are changing the face of the country. It is less often noted that China also has another billion people who have not yet been fully included in these new economic and social changes. The following, if you will, are some fragments from the story of the other billion.

My personal blog is Bendilaowai.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: construction, other billion, real estate bubble
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This collection of photographs, entitled “Prelude,” captures the awe and foreboding one feels around these instant cities. These photographs are ecological in the classical sense of the word—”eco” meaning “home” in Greek, and “log” meaning “word”—since they create a dialogue about home, about the way infrastructure first reflects our aspirations and assumptions, and then shapes them.

Captured with a wide-angled lens and unfiltered film exposures, the construction sites appear as underworld environs, and the accordion-folded, residential high-rises of these metropolises morph into what could be never-ending circuit boards.

While these structures spring from the clash and synthesis of Adam Smith and Mao Zedong, they also reflect the breakneck speed at which sprawl is entangling cities worldwide. The photographs, by rendering images of the home as cold and disturbing, question how the most powerful nations on earth fetishize bigger and faster growth without adequately addressing the need for sustainable economies and lifestyles. Peering into his pictures, we see space stations on a lunar landscape, a future in which the last tree on earth has long ago been uprooted.

Watch the slideshow here.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: cities, construction, urbanization
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