I talked about buildings made of Chinesium and rotten tail buildings, upon which construction stops but upon which mortgage owners are still expected to make payments.
Shoddy Chinese construction practices don’t stop there. This week an entire Chinese residential skyscraper went up in flames:
Fires are hardly unknown among American skyscrapers, but usually they occur in older buildings, not ones built this century, as modern construction practices like firewalls and sprinkler systems generally prevent fires from spreading from floor to floor. The Lotus Garden China Telecom building in Changsha was finished in 2000.
Buildings made from subpar constriction materials in China are know as “Tofu Dregs” buildings, as though they were built out of tofu:
About 6:19 in you can see a concrete crossbeam mostly filled with sand.
Shoddy construction practices extend to buildings, roads, bridges, flood walls and other infrastructure. It’s hard to do quality work when cutting corners seems to be your national ethos…
Tags: China, Chinesium, Communism, Foreign Policy, fraud, Tofu Dregs buildings, video
This fire had nothing to do with sprinklers or fire walls (presence or absence of either). It was the combustible cladding -aka exterior panels. A similar disaster happened to the Grenfall Tower in England and somewhat similar at the Monte Carlo Casino Hotel in Las Vegas.
But yeah, Chinese construction practices are pretty bad.
As I have visited PRC a great many times on a supposed “QAQC” control program I recall repeatedly seeing concrete columns before cladding COMPLETELY embedded all all sorts of construction trash and lumber sticking out of the skin from settling in Sonotube. I became accustomed to structural embeddment treated as though garbage chute. Quite common.
It ain’t just China.
Korea, back during the 1990s, was similar. The crap I witnessed on Korean construction sites, and heard about from good friend who was an Army construction inspector…? Yeesh.
I personally witnessed Korean construction going on that flatly blew my mind. They were putting up a six-story concrete frame building that I used to walk by on the way going to the local bus stop, typical of Korean architecture at the time. The first thing I noticed was that they formed three stories up for the supports and floors, all at once… Which is a hell of a long way to drop concrete down the support forms. Typically, in the US, that sort of thing is done one floor at a time, and then you very carefully vibrate each form to get all the voids out that form, as well as to consolidate the aggregate. These guys were doing three floors at a time, and I couldn’t figure out how they were doing it, so I paid attention to the technique, thinking I’d learn something. What I learned the day they pulled the forms, and before the inspectors presumably showed up, was that there were massive voids in the concrete that the workers were blithely going around and filling in with trash and mortar. At least one corner pillar that I observed could be seen all the way through, before the insertion of the trash/mortar coverup.
I wasn’t surprised when that downtown shopping center collapsed, other than that I was shocked it stood for so long with a slapdash expansion and swimming pool built above it. I was actually in that building shopping, once, and it was cosmetically fine. No idea at all that they’d added like three more floors and a pool, with no attention paid to beefing up the lower floors.
What we GIs called the Hangju bridge was being replaced the whole time I was there, by a beautiful award-winning design from Germany. The new bridge collapsed a few months after I returned to the US, and one of my guys was on the old one. What had happened was that they’d cheap-jacked the concrete on the new bridge, and since it was one of those where they formed a section and pushed it out over the river, then did the next, when they were at about the 70% point, the sub-par concrete they’d been using reached its compression limits and then collapsed entirely, dropping most of the new bridge into the river next to the old one. My former subordinate caught up with me later in the US and described what happened as he sat stuck in traffic on the old bridge, which was the delightful experience of feeling the old bridge rise beneath them by about six inches and shift to the east by what felt like six inches but was actually only around two. The old bridge barely managed to maintain its position over the bearings at the abutments, and required a lot of shoring/repair work to remain in operation. Lawsuits galore–The Germans who designed the thing were aghast at what they found during discovery, in terms of construction quality standards. The forensics were… Interesting. I can’t remember who won the case over that, but I’m pretty sure that since it was a Korean court, things did not go well for the German architects.
Much of Asia has a general culture of fatalism coupled with greed and a bizarre inability to connect cause with effect. You literally have to change the culture, in order to ensure that they won’t cut corners, which everyone from the guys out doing the work to the guys in the front offices are in on. Korean companies that do work for American military contracts are notorious for going bankrupt when they discover that they actually have to meet contract specifications and that they’re gonna be inspected. Even then, a lot of stuff slides through the cracks.
You tell me I’m gonna have to live in a building constructed by some outfit from Asia? If they’re not Japanese, I’m gonna be out over there in that field, living in a tent…
I mean, we have our problems here in the US, but… Man. Asia is just a whole other dimension of “ain’t quite right”.
As Tendenci Fallova’s enlightened disciples know, “Becoming One with Everything means that nothing matters.”
The new Oakland Bay bridge was constructed by the Chinese, with Chinese steel.
@Kirk, going back a little farther, in the early 80s my wife and I lived off base near (almost touching the wall) Osan AB in the Hando Apts. We had two apartments to choose from and chose the 5th floor walk-up instead of the 1st floor unit for one big reason: In spite of the buildings having been built with concrete containing too much aggregate so that when it rained the building would change color from the top down as it absorbed moisture, and in spite of there being limited hot water which seemed to run out on the top floor first, there were central garbage chutes which meant the 1st floor got to deal with rats on a regular basis. I hate rats.
@ John,
I’m told things have changed over there, but I’d still exercise a lot of caution when it came to where I lived were I stationed there again.
I used to work with a guy who was an Army Corps of Engineers district officer assigned to Seoul. He was asked to provide a risk assessment to the command in reference to earthquake-resistant construction practices in Seoul, with particular attention paid to contract housing for US dependents. His take on what Seoul would likely look like after a significant earthquake event was “You wouldn’t need to worry about the North Koreans or their artillery flattening the place… It would all already be at ground level.”
Korea hasn’t had the salutary benefit of being subject to constant jostling-about like the Japanese have. Japan is paranoid about construction standards and disaster drilling, while that sort of thing happens so rarely on the Korean peninsula that they’re utterly complacent about the issues of shoddy construction. You build it for crap in Japan, it’s likely gonna cave in on you during your lifetime. In Korea, it’s such a rare event that they just don’t have the social or cultural conventions laid down the way the Japanese do.
To a degree, I think the Japanese “national character” is shaped by the risk factors it experiences, while the Koreans are shaped by the lack thereof. Japan is used to its stuff falling down; Koreans are not. This influences the insouciant way they approach construction standards and adherence to same.
cheeflo–I lived in Oakland while the new BB was under construction. There was a Chinese-American engineer who blew the whistle on bad construction. Specifically, the underwater steel was not properly protected from salt water erosion. I expect major damage in 20 years or the next big quake, whichever comes first.
OT … Krystal & Saagar discuss Biden, Putin, Ukraine, and nukes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZYyJ27razo
I gotta say, the phrase “just-the-tip nuclear weapon detonation” … wow. Just wow. She’s got a way with words!
I recommend the book Poorly Made in China. What made it particularly interesting was the author’s apparent lack of self-reflection: he was a middleman working with Chinese contract manufacturers and companies outside China, and my takeaway from the book was that the author was blithely describing the problem, and was himself part of the problem.
[…] This week an entire Chinese residential skyscraper went up in flames […]
If you read Charles Mann’s 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, you’ll see that this is nothing new for China: We’ve all been here, before.
Pay particular attention to the chapters about the Spanish/Chinese trade at Manila, and how the Chinese would show up with tons of goods they’d manufactured on spec, sometimes to very shoddy standards, and then try to sell to the Spanish for gold and silver from the New World. The trade imbalances that came from this are what led directly to a bunch of unexpected side-effects that nobody saw coming, not the least of which were those that destroyed both Spain and China eventually.
As to manufacture in China…? Look back at the way the US ate the lunch of the British Empire, with a lot of the manufacturing we did. It’s all of a piece with an economy on the rise, worldwide.
One thing about US manufacturers doing business in China I’ve always found amusing is that they naively think that IP won’t be violated, and that the Chinese won’t run a second shift making things for themselves or that factory seconds that don’t meet standards won’t be sold off the back dock. You may make money for a little bit, but the end state is, you’re only training the Chinese to make your products cheaper and destroying your own market.
History. Learn it, or repeat it. We seem hell-bent on repeating it, over and over and over again.
[…] guesstimate, and explains a whole host of observable facts, from banking and mortgage problems to tofu dregs buildings to their inability to manufacture advanced […]