sand castles

I've been a bit mystified by the construction techniques since I arrived in China. Not that I really know anything about construction, but it definitely seems quite a bit different. As I mentioned in my posting about the mall with the laser tag and such on the fourth or fifth floor, things here are not built to last. They throw buildings up really, really quickly and within a year there are huge cracks in the walls and whatnot.

This junkyard looking area is the beginning of an apartment building. They cleared it in one day. Put up a brick wall around it the next day. Covered the bring wall in mortar towards the end of that same day and dug whatever holes they needed to start putting the building up.

This seeming shoddiness of the construction is exaggerated by the inefficient use of manpower as well. For example, the mall across the street from my school is really new (maybe a couple of years old only) and has some nice tile work on the ground surrounding it. Last week I noticed a huge pile of sand outside, and in China, sand equals construction. Later that day they started chipping up bits of tile all around the mall. There was absolutely nothing wrong with the tiles, China is just always trying to create jobs and find SOMETHING for people to do, so they paid men to chip up perfectly good tile and then relay it. Which made it seem like something was wrong with the tile (shoddy construction), when in reality nothing was. This is similar to what was happening in one of the photos I posted from the other mall referenced above, a man was chipping up tile just to put it right back where he pulled it up from.

 

The sand really is the most confusing part though; what they do with all of it?! There are just mountains and mountains of sand anywhere they're building or fixing anything. They don't have big dump trucks either, they bring it all in in bags and then when they're finished they bag up the extra by hand and take it out again.

This is the remains of a huge pile of sand that went going up to an 11th story apartment that is in the final stages of building, being finished.

They use a big metal bin and a man powered pulley system to get the sand up to high floors. You can kind of see the bin next to the building about midway up.

When they are going to renevoate a space or knock down a building to put up something new, they don't bother to clear the rubble or remains of the old construction, they build right over it or maybe push it to the corner, it's kind of nuts. Granted this is all observations from smaller cities here, but that's most of China.

Why did they tear down the roof in this one section of a strip mall that's getting remodeled? Who knows.

Tons of trash and crap still in this space in the same strip mall that's also getting remodeled.