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Last year, American consulting firm McKinsey predicted an unpleasant surprise that China might spring on the world this year: that a major office block would collapse in Chaoyang, Beijing’s central business district.

Such an unthinkable scenario, perhaps reflecting the firm’s reservations about the quality of economic growth in China, unfortunately came true last week.

The only difference was that it was not an office block in Beijing that collapsed but an unfinished residential block in an upmarket, middle-class residential district in Shanghai.

The article – Seven Ways China Might Surprise Us In 2009 – by McKinsey’s Shanghai director, Mr Gordon Orr, was published in the Oct 30, 2008 issue of the McKinsey Quarterly.

He wrote: ‘True, construction standards came under fire after the May 2008 Sichuan earthquake felled many school buildings. But the reaction to that tragedy would pale beside the response to a similar one in a rich urban area with immediate media access.’

In other words, the earthquake provided an excellent excuse for the collapse of the thousands of jerry-built structures. Officials could put the blame squarely on force majeure, and no one needed to be held accountable.

After due investigations, the Sichuan government was able to declare proudly that there were no substandard buildings before the quake.

The collapse of the Shanghai residential block on June 27, on the other hand, provided no such excuse.

In fact, to have such a mishap happen in China’s most affluent city is totally unacceptable. After all, Shanghai has its sights set on becoming the country’s international financial centre by 2020.

So, if the tragedy in Sichuan is not enough of a wake-up call, surely the Shanghai incident is.

Mr Orr was certainly not the only person to have accurately predicted that such a construction disaster was just waiting to happen, but he did so openly.

In 2007, when a brand-new highway bridge in Fenghuang, in western Hunan province, collapsed just days before its inauguration, many Chinese were already saying that a building collapse could happen sooner or later.

But why do such infrastructure collapses take place in the first place?

An anonymous civil engineer, who felt duty-bound to follow his conscience, wrote a long piece to the People’s Daily forum detailing the hidden rules in the construction industry and their extension to the Chinese society at large.

Any civil engineering project, by law, has to clear several stages: geological prospecting, architectural design, quality checks, material surveys, as well as quality and safety supervision. Each stage plays a role in ensuring the building’s safety.

Greed drives some developers and builders to cut costs – and corners – by skipping some of the stages.

They are able to get away with it because impartial and substantive government supervision and professional ethics are absent.

On the face of it, China has among the best laws and regulations governing the construction industry, including detailed and specific requirements on the standard of materials used.

But according to the civil engineer, not all of these rules and regulations are strictly adhered to.

For example, Chinese laws require a site of a certain size and geological formation to sink a specified number of wells to ensure that the foundation is stable.

Yet, more often than not, fewer wells than mandated are sunk – to cut costs.

The architectural firm making the lowest bid usually clinches the job. In recent years, it has been found that the amount of steel used per square metre in high-rise buildings has fallen from 80kg-90kg to 30kg. This clearly compromises safety.

Quality control of the foundation is also lax. Industry regulations require that, in a project, a specific number of piles must undergo static loading test continuously for a specific duration. However, it is not uncommon to find that only 10 per cent of the required number of piles are tested.

Three different tests are required to assess the stability of the foundation, but this regulation is never followed because of the high cost of conducting three tests.

So why have the developers and builders been able to escape scrutiny?

The reason is that they fork out money to buy the necessary signature that goes on the certificate of quality.

‘It would be hard to believe that the buildings built in this social and political ecology could stand for long,’ the disgruntled civil engineer wrote.

He is right. Recently constructed buildings are surprisingly short-lived.

Take the award-winning China Sports Museum. Built in 1990 as part of the Asian Games sports complex, the structure should come with a 100-year guarantee.

Yet, just 15 years later, long cracks on its floor and walls have practically rendered the building a dangerous structure.

Perhaps, China’s most short-lived building was in the city of Chongqing, where a residential building had to be torn down just six months after its completion, in 2007.

After the collapse of the Fenghuang bridge, officials disclosed that there were 10 other cases of comparable severity between 2000 and 2007, with the bulk occurring after 2004.

Simply put, the older the bridge, the sturdier and safer it is.

Shoddy projects are so prevalent in recent years that civil engineers have lamented that buildings put up in the reform and open-door era last only about 30 years.

It is an alarming state of affairs.

Mr Orr noted: ‘Although officials would scramble to rewrite construction regulations, a disaster in the capital or another large city would change the relationship between the country’s growing middle class and the government and might threaten its ability to keep social unrest in check.’

He knows just too well the social fabric that makes for shoddy constructions and the political ecology that perpetuates them.

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Cutting corners

Greed drives some developers and builders to cut costs – and corners – by skipping some of the construction stages. They are able to get away with it because impartial and substantive government supervision and professional ethics are absent.

Source : Sunday Times – 5 Jul 2009