The future belongs to China

[Perota]

As the United States and China battle over the finer points of currency manipulation at the G-20 summit, American negotiators may want to take note of this startling testimonial to the productivity of Chinese workers: A construction crew in the south-central Chinese city of Changsha has completed a 15-story hotel in just six days. If nothing else, this remarkable achievement will stoke further complaints from American economic pundits that China's economy is far more accomplished than ours in tending to such basics as construction.

Chinese workers build 15-story hotel in just six days | The Upshot Yahoo! News


Meanwhile in the west ...

NEW YORK – Citing a shortage of priests who can perform the rite, the nation's Roman Catholic bishops are holding a conference on how to conduct exorcisms.

Catholic bishops: More exorcists needed - Yahoo! News

[dirtydog]

[BobR]

I cannot help but to wonder about the quality of the construction, but your basic premise is right; China is on their way up, America slit its wrists 30 something years ago and has just about bled out. It is impossible for anyone intelligent to be surprised about America's terminl economic condition considering the trade deficits and systematic exportation of well paying jobs since the Reagan era.

[PaulBunyon]

Don't forget how many buildings fell during that last big quake they had. Also you will never know how many were injured in the process of these 'examples' of some sort of excellence.

[Mid]

awesome work BUT there are some liberties being taken with the Time accounting .

there is no way the building was constructed in 2 days , erected maybe

constructed , never .

[Bangyai]

Watching that video makes me think of China as a vast legoland with a bit of Meccano thrown in.

Mind you , anyone who lives in a Preuksa Real Estate home is used to prefab construction.

Then of course there is a British prefab :

[keda]

Excellent piece of work, if it stays up in the next big wind.

[Thormaturge]

if it falls down they can spend a day clearing the site and two days erecting another building. Within a week it will be as though nothing happened.

A few people will die, of course, but they're used to that. The West can, of course, refuse to trade with China on moral grounds but just now the moral issue is taking second place to $$$$$$.

[Loy Toy]

Anyone who doubts China can suit themselves.

Nostradamous predicted it centuries before the rest started to ignore it.

[teddy]

My wife is Chinese Thai as I have chosen the correct horse to ride for future economic security. Western wives will bleed you dry after a divorce and Issan wives will bleed you dry but Chinese wives will make sure their husband keeps receiving blood transfusions. I have pity and only a little scorn for those about to miss out because of poor choices.

[Mid]

must be nice to know your shit doesn't stink

hey teddy fcuk you

[Thormaturge]

Nostradamous predicted it centuries before the rest started to ignore it.

Did he say anything about next week's lottery?

[Mid]

China Faces Cost of Fast Work
Michael Lelyveld
2012-09-03

Bridge and building collapses take heavy toll.


Police investigate the collapsed eight-lane suspension bridge in Harbin, Aug. 24, 2012.
AFP

A deadly bridge accident in China's northeast Harbin city has brought personal tragedy and a grim reminder of problems that the country will face from its building binge of the past several years.

The collapse of an elevated ramp to the Yangmingtan Bridge on Aug. 24 killed three people and injured five as trucks plunged to the ground, raising questions about the quality of China's construction projects.

The 1.8-billion yuan (U.S $296-million) bridge over the Songhua River in Heilongjiang province had only been open to traffic since November. It was at least the sixth major bridge collapse in China since July 2011, the official Xinhua news agency said.

It also cast doubt on the government's pledge to enforce building standards after the magnitude-7.9 earthquake that hit Sichuan province in May 2008, killing thousands of students in dozens of destroyed schools.

Less than a year after the quake, China's massive 4-trillion yuan (U.S. $658 billion) stimulus program in 2009 spurred a construction boom unprecedented in speed and scale.

But safety and quality have suffered, often with fatal results.

Most recently, four workers died on Aug. 25 when a fire brigade office collapsed during construction in Guangzhou, capital of coastal Guangdong province.

One day later, Xinhua reported that 28 officials were punished for another building collapse in Guangdong's Shanwei City that killed six last November.

Repeatedly failed

New roads and highways have repeatedly failed. In one case, the surface of Tianding Expressway in northwest Gansu province has sunk away so often after a year in service that drivers have called it "jelly-built."

Corruption is frequently cited as the cause of corner-cutting in construction. Public anger has risen along with the risks.

"Tofu engineering work leads to a tofu bridge," said one blog posting cited by The New York Times after the Harbin accident, despite official suggestions that overloaded trucks were at fault.

Rapid construction has often produced disasters, as in the July 2011 crash of two high-speed trains that killed 40 people and forced a freeze on new rail projects. The collision in eastern Zhejiang province's Wenzhou city was blamed on bad signaling systems.

Aside from the dangers, flawed construction has saddled China with continuing energy costs, since many projects may have to be redone.

In 2010, a senior official of the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development told Guangzhou's Southern Metropolis Daily that over half of the country's housing structures would have to replaced within 20 years.

"Only those homes built after 1999 are likely to be preserved in the longer term," said Chen Huai, director of the ministry's policy research center.

The official English-language China Daily quoted housing Vice Minister Qiu Baoxing as saying that Chinese buildings can only last 25 to 30 years, compared with an average life span of 74 years in the United States and 132 years in Britain.

Falls short

Most of China's new housing also falls short of the government's energy and environmental goals.

Last year, the housing ministry's chief planner, Tang Kai, said that 95 percent of new buildings are "energy-guzzling," Xinhua reported. Only "a very small share" can be considered energy efficient, Tang said.

Philip Andrews-Speed, a China energy expert and associate fellow of the London-based Chatham House policy institute, said that shoddy construction shows "the continuing inability or unwillingness of local governments to enforce building codes."

In addition to safety concerns, Andrews-Speed cited "the cost in terms of energy and raw materials of rebuilding or refitting these inefficient, relatively new buildings."

Since buildings account for an estimated 30 percent of China's total energy use, the country could be paying the price for years, if they are not replaced or repaired.

The government has yet to disclose energy efficiency data for the first half of the year, but it recently re-released its 2011 figures, showing that conservation fell short of official goals.

Last year, energy use per unit of gross domestic product (GDP), a measure of the value of a country's economic activity, fell 2.01 percent, according to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), far short of the pace needed to meet the government's five-year target of a 16-percent cut by 2015.

Total energy consumption climbed 7 percent in the biggest jump since 2007, Bloomberg News said.

On Aug. 29, National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) Minister Zhang Ping said that the "energy intensity" index had dropped in the first six months of 2012, but he did not say how much.

It is hard to estimate how much energy has been wasted by slapdash construction, but substandard projects are likely to take a continuing toll.

Government blamed

In an unusually strong commentary on Aug. 28, Xinhua blamed the government for failing to improve safety and building practices, citing a recent series of accidents including the Harbin collapse and a bus crash in northwestern Shaanxi province that left 36 dead.

Public complaints have been mounting ahead of the upcoming ruling Chinese Communist Party National Congress, where new leaders are expected to be chosen.

"Such man-made disasters deserve more attention from the government as the [Party] gears up for a key national congress later this year. And, for much of the general public, the more fatal accidents occur, the greater the government's credibility is undermined," Xinhua said.

The push for rapid economic growth has also come in for criticism.

"Over the years, many local officials have been single-minded in pursuing gross domestic product growth, ignoring the government's basic function of protecting the people and heeding calls from the public," said the commentary.

"This obsession with GDP data should not come at the cost of the people's safety," it said.

rfa.org

[reinvented]

changsha is an incredible shithole; the food is the worst ive ever tasted
dont give a fuck how long it stays up
wont be visiting it
now the exorcist job

[Yasojack]

Hey Teddy lets hope the isaan revolution doesn't spoil your life, most likely the thai/chinese will be the first to get the chop.

My wife is Chinese Thai as I have chosen the correct horse to ride for future economic security. Western wives will bleed you dry after a divorce and Issan wives will bleed you dry but Chinese wives will make sure their husband keeps receiving blood transfusions. I have pity and only a little scorn for those about to miss out because of poor choices.

[Gerbil]

^ Teddy was banned ages ago. God knows why this thread was bumped

[Mid]

God knows why this thread was bumped

not the sharpest tool in the shed are you ?

[Panty Hamster]

China will speed past the rest of the world provided they don't take one of their highways or high-speed rail trains or go anywhere near any building. Apart from that, they're golden.

[OhOh]

Considering they have only adopted many of these in the past decade or so and relied in many cases on foreign experts. They aren't doing too badly.

[Mid]

They aren't doing too badly.

Barbaric Animals , EOS .