At our neighboring university, a 5-minute walk from our campus, someone had decided to build on the site of a large, old pond. They drained, they dug, and they built piers, all in the extended rainy season of late spring. They got up to road level before it became clear that they hadn't laid a sturdy-enough foundation. Without warning, during an especially wet spell, half of the building fell over. Columns and floors collapsed into a heap in the bottom of the old pond bed. For the past month, workers have labored with sledgehammers and shoulderpoles to break the concrete into bits and haul them out of the hole. Construction on the still-standing half is halted. I presume that, once they reach underground-zero, they will build again with a stronger foundation.
Except for very tall, modern buildings, the Chinese (at least in this part of China) still rely on hard labor and avoid machinery. Concrete is mixed onsite by laborers with shovels and a small, gas-powered mixer. Some buildings have a hoist, but most use ramps made from bamboo "planks." Laborers carry all the construction materials up the ramps using shoulderpoles. When I was younger, I worked summers as a laborer on masonry crews. It was tough. I thought hod carrying was the worst possible job for a laborer, but in China it's just normal work. There is no OSHA, labor union, insurance plan, or worker's compensation. If someone is killed or disabled, the company will give the poor family some "sympathy" money, and that's the end of it.
Whenever Anne and I walk past a construction site, we exchange a look and an implicit comment about the lack of adequate steel reinforcement. Steel I-beams are literally a foreign concept in local construction. For example, on the way into Xiangtan, a new main road is being built alongside the old one, with bridges across two creeks or irrigation canals. There is no heavy equipment, only laborers with common tools. As far as I can tell, the spans are being cast onsite, using forms to shape the outside and thin wire (no I-beams, not even rebar) for reinforcement. Apparently the spans, when ready, will be hoisted somehow and moved into place. Hey, if it works, it works. However, I'm not very confident that the bridges will last long under heavy traffic, to say nothing of a mild earthquake.
The Chinese will make just about anything from concrete. They mix it, lay out a little wire or rebar, spread the concrete on the ground into whatever shape they need, and let it dry. Shelves, roof tiles, rowboats — it doesn't matter.
I'm teaching English to civil-engineering students this spring, so I went to the school library and found some American textbooks on statics, foundations, and strengths of materials. In the back of one textbook, I found the standard safety-factor formula used to design structures. The strength must be at least 40% greater than the weight of the building itself, plus at least 70% greater than the weight of people and equipment at full capacity. In other words, minimum design strength = 1.4 x dead load + 1.7 x live load. I showed the formula to my students, and they informed me it was much too extravagant. They are taught to use 20% and 20% as safety factors, if I understood them correctly. I cautioned them that 20% wasn't enough; they should design their roads and bridges and buildings stronger. Structures frequently fall down in China, especially in earthquakes. If someone is killed, or if negligence or corruption is shown, the builder or the architect is quite likely to be executed. I told them the well-known story of the Hyatt-Regency skywalk collapse in America, where one or two hundred people had died because of an ill-considered design modification. The contractor and architect lost their licenses, but no one was executed or even imprisoned. Given the typical level of quality control, cost cutting, and bribery associated with Chinese construction, I wouldn't put my signature to any design that is trimmed to a 20% safety margin.
Despite the heavy indoctrination that the universe is completely materialistic (no God, no soul), most Chinese are quite superstitious. One widespread superstition is that, for whatever reason, blood will solve bad luck in construction. In our city, for example, a big bridge was built across the Xiang River, which is perhaps equivalent in size to the Ohio River in America. Unfortunately, the contractor could not get the bridge to join properly in the middle. He went to the police station and asked that, the next time a group of criminals was executed, the sentence would be carried out at the construction site. So it was done and soon after that, as the story goes, the problem was solved. I also heard the story of a local man who heard noises in his house at night. He thought it was haunted by ghosts. (Ghosts are a popular superstition and are a common theme in many Hong Kong movies.) He went to a friend who worked at the Public Security Bureau (the police) and asked for a rope used to bind a criminal at execution. The friend brought him a blood-stained rope. The man buried pieces of it all around the house, and the noises stopped. Such stories are not rare.
By the way, the standard method of execution is shooting at close range. The family is charged for the cost of the bullet. I've heard that there are 43 crimes on the books that carry the death penalty. White-collar corruption is one of them, so it pays to maintain good political connections. Bank robbery and crimes using guns also are capital offenses. The unfortunate consequence is that criminals usually kill all bank guards and witnesses as standard procedure. They have nothing to lose by adding murder to the charges against them. OK, back to more mundane matters, such as construction and demolition...
Yet again, our college has torn up the main street in our little village. They are repaving, apparently to connect to a new entrance gate that will be built at the new road. The laborers use shovels to fill a medium-size cement mixer. They empty the mixer bucket into a small dump bed on the back of one of the all-purpose hand tractors that are so common in China. The hand tractor hauls the cement to the end of the newly completed section and dumps its load. The remainder of the work is all done by hand.
Where our little alley connects to this street, a retired teacher has spent the last three years creating and improving a decorative garden. It occupies a triangular plot of ground between his apartment, the alley, and the street. Earlier this year, workers came around and cut down all the sycamore trees that line the streets. I could understand why, because the trees had been planted underneath power lines and already had been severely pruned several times. In some places the fallen trunks and their stumps were removed, and other trees were planted in their place. Along the edge of the teacher's garden, though, the stumps were left lying in their untidy holes for months. Next, a deep trench was cut across the center of the garden plot, to lay electrical cables. When they had finished, the garden looked like a war zone. The teacher stoically moved his potted plants and dug up others that he wanted to save, and he set them along the narrow sidewalk that ran along the edge of the apartment building. It appeared that he had salvaged enough space and enough plants to continue his beloved pastime. The workers, however, hadn't completed their assigned tasks. One evening after the street had been repaved, a team of laborers came with heavy hoes, shoulderpoles, and a hand tractor. Overnight they systematically dug away the entire garden down to street level. That is, they hauled off 3 or 4 feet of soil. They even chopped away half of the sidewalk, leaving only a very narrow strip between the building and the cut. Now they are busy burying all the existing wires and pipes that had underlain the garden. The teacher's pride and joy, the result of 3 years of loving care, have been chopped to pieces; all traces of the former beauty have been removed. It is unlikely that the authorities will offer him any compensation or sympathy.
The State owns all the land in China, as I understand it. Until recently, pretty much all the apartment buildings were public housing. In the last few years, people are being encouraged to buy their apartments. Farmhouses and commercial buildings are privately owned, but the land underneath belongs to the State. Except in the countryside among the peasants, I haven't seen anyone who lives in a single-family home; everyone lives in an apartment building. Many shopkeepers eat and sleep in their shops, which are usually quite small. They cook their meals and brush their teeth out on the sidewalk.
The old teacher is not alone in his misfortune. Along a mile-or-so stretch where the new main road is being built, probably several hundred farmers have been displaced from their old farmhouses. The process began during the cold of winter. Many houses were knocked down into rubble, and the farmer occupants had to live in open-air shacks while they built new houses a few hundred yards away. Now (the beginning of summer) most of the houses are nearing completion and the families can move in. However, the road construction hasn't yet reached the area where the old houses were destroyed. Instead of turning out families in the cold of winter, in my mind, the demolition could have waited until now, when the weather is warm and the new houses are ready. I'm sure the officials would have some explanation — they always do — but to a foreigner it shows only an indifference to the hardships of the lower class.
In a society where the average lifetime of a building now seems to be 20 years, little attention is given to maintenance, whether preventive or remedial. A typical window in an old apartment contains perhaps a dozen small panes of glass in a wood frame. Anne was looking at the building behind our apartment and noted that about half of all the panes were broken. Some had been covered over with cardboard or a piece of wood; others were left open to the weather. It certainly is not difficult or expensive to replace broken panes. Glass costs about 2 yuan (25 cents) per pane, and the standard practice is simply to tack the glass into the wooden frame with small brads. Glazing or caulking apparently is too bothersome. Yet few, if any, of the inhabitants of the apartments around us perform any kind of maintenance. Perhaps it is due to some "socialist/collective" attitude of non-responsibility. Perhaps in a country where the State owns all the property there is little incentive to invest in improvements. Perhaps there persists a survival mechanism of not doing anything to draw attention to oneself as an individual. Perhaps the old habits are simply slow to change. Perhaps such menial labor is beneath their class position. Perhaps they are hoping to move soon to a new building. I don't presume to understand, nor is it my place to judge these resilient and adaptable people. Still, 'tis a puzzlement...
We have noticed that, where people have purchased their old apartments or purchased newly built apartments, they show greater willingness to maintain and improve what they have. For example, several families have remodeled their kitchens this year. One day we might hear sledgehammering (actually this is quite a common sound in China) and notice that the outer kitchen wall of an apartment has been knocked down, leaving a gaping hole to the outside. Perhaps the old kitchen was cramped, dark, drafty, and irredeemably stained with years of cooking grease. With a few hours of sweat, it's all changed. By the next day, a new wall is bricked up, in bay-window style, with a modern fan and a new aluminum-frame window. A new stove sits on the shelves that have been cast in concrete on the floor, mortared into place, and covered with the ubiquitous white tile. The cook is happy... To my knowledge, no one makes such an effort to improve an apartment that he doesn't own.
Leaky pipes are a constant annoyance and, thus, provide another example of the local attitude towards maintenance. Every time our waiban (the person who manages the foreign teachers) visits us, we remind him that water is leaking somewhere in the floor above us. We show him/her the spreading stains on the plaster ceiling and walls. We point to the water that drips constantly from the ceilings of our two bathrooms. (We have two identical apartments, side by side.) Whenever we occupy our throne, so to speak, water drips on our crown. Sometimes the drip is a stream; sometimes it drips from the bare lightbulb; sometimes it collects inside the lightbulb and causes a short. Despite our continuing requests and a few half-hearted attempts to fix them, though, the leaks have never been fixed, and they slowly grow worse.
In the larger analysis, however, we try to remember that these aggravations and imperfections are merely inconveniences and not major problems. In one of the Baha'i prayers, we ask for assistance in conforming ourselves "to that meekness which no provocation can ruffle, to that patience which no affliction can overwhelm..." In short, we try not to let such things bother us. More than in America, my challenge here is to maintain perspective, to look at Chinese society within the context of a long-term process of development. The problems and shortcomings of China are the problems of all nations, to a greater or lesser extent. No society has all the answers. All are struggling to deal with the consequences of the past, the attitudes of the present, and the "premature arrival of the future."
As a reminder of this global perspective, we were visited recently by a foreigner who has lived in many third-world countries. For example, she lived in Liberia during the civil war there. In her opinion, conditions are very good in China. It is the most developed of the developing countries, she said. For the vast majority of the Chinese people, there is no day-to-day worry of starvation, not to mention plague, looting, open warfare, massacre, kidnapping, or wholesale rape, she pointed out. The levels of individual security and opportunity in China are, if far from ideal, yet far from the abysmal depths that afflict much of humanity.
Great changes have occurred and will continue in China. It is our hope that, in their quest to build a better world for themselves, the Chinese will be inspired to develop their spiritual qualities in addition to their material development. In this way, and only in this way, can the Chinese people create lasting and positive improvements in their own society. In this way they can serve as a model for and an aid to other peoples who are currently less fortunate.
In the meantime, don't get caught inside during an earthquake...
Notes about this web page