Absurdity, Allegory and China

CCTV project from the east end of the Kerry Centre

There is a perennial incompleteness that haunts mainland Chinese cities, second and third tier cities as well as the nation’s capital. In the foreground of the above photo you can see scaffolding, green construction mesh,  and the top of a tent where migrant workers live in the very heart of the Central Business District, across the East Third Ring Road from one of the landmark architectural projects in Beijing, which itself was rendered “incomplete” when the clients, CCTV (China Central Television) set their building (left), the TVCC, on fire in February 2009 during an illegal fireworks display a few short months before the opening of the building as the Mandarin Oriental Hotel. The fire was responsible for the death of a firefighter and disruption of hundreds of lives, and the sparking of a spectacular corruption case that has seen many hauled off to jail. (Yesterday the China Daily reported that two-and-a-half months after the beginning of the fire trial twenty (20) people “have received jail terms ranging from three to seven years.” Xu Wei, the former head of construction was given the stiffest sentence and was also pinned with the sole responsibility of ordering the catastrophic and fatal fireworks display.)

In the foreground of the photo is a small square at the east end of the Kerry Center, one of the prime five-star hotels in Beijing. It’s as if no one can quite make up their mind as to what the final product is supposed to actually look like, so the decision is made to do it all over again. This particular site has been in a state of constant construction or repair for at least three years (and if my memory was a bit better I could probably add a few more years to that total), cluttering a space that could very well be left alone and allowed to evolve into a niche of quiet sanity in the midst of all the frenzy, a place to sit and watch the reconstruction of the TVCC. Is this an issue of indecisveness, poor quality construction or both?

In this photo the white crane in front of the TVCC is in the process of being raised, which I assume has something to do with the renovation from the extensive fire damage, as it has been reported that the building will be reconstructed and serve – sometime in the unspecified future – as a hotel as per the original plan.

Last month the China Daily ran an interview with Ashley Howlett, a construction lawyer who “leads the Greater China construction practice as a partner with Jones Day in Beijing,” entitled Poor construction quality keeps foreign property buyers away. It is a particularly critical assessment of construction in Beijing and, by extension, all of China. Anyone who has lived in China for more than a week is able to understand Howlett’s appraisal of the lack of quality that should scare off anyone with the least thought of buying residential or commercial property.

The quickly built but cheaply made buildings in Beijing will not literally fall down, but will deteriorate. Wall paint will peel and elevators won’t work. Buildings will become uncomfortable because they will not have been properly maintained. That’s when people will start to realize they’ve paid a lot of money to buy a place in the Central Business District and they’ve paid management charges, but nothing works and everything looks really poor. But the developers will probably be long gone by then, so I’m not sure what people will do.

Many buildings in Beijing are built with the cheapest materials available, which tend to degrade quickly. This is a worryingly common phenomenon. There are many buildings here that appear as if they are 10 or 15 years old, but are really just five years old. That’s a little bit sad.

This is the main reasons why there is a persistent, unfinished appearance to so many projects in high profile neighborhoods that seem to be permanently under construction. Most (though not all) places that are not wrapped in the construction shroud are in the process of high-speed decay. My default response to seeing a quiet neighborhood is to wonder how long it will be before major renovation commences or, as is happening far too often, demolition will begin.

I am not qualified to judge what this means economically, though it seems like a plan to keep migrant workers employed. How long this can be afforded or tolerated is just a matter of time. As homeowners watch the inevitable depreciation of their investments I can only imagine that they will not be happy. I also imagine that this has already commenced.

When I first moved to China a dozen years ago we lived in a building that had sewer gas problems of biblical proportions. Our building was not an anomaly. When I asked about a simple plumbing J trap it was as if I were asking a science fiction question. My conclusion was that the entire Chinese indoor plumbing system had been turned over to people who had never used such a thing. If you had seen construction sites back in the late 1990s you would understand how I’d come to that conclusion: workers slept in the open spaces they were building, and each construction site had it’s own kitchen as well as shallow latrine. Things have generally gotten a bit better, but the improvements in the quality of construction has not kept stride with the inflated property values. As long as workers are paid what can only be described as barely a subsistence wage the problem of poor quality construction will continue to plague China. In a land where labor shortages have never been an issue  – where one person fills a hole as well as any other – undervalued labor guarantees an inferior product, and construction becomes a constant state. That is, as long as the money holds out.