China Builds 30-Story Hotel In Just 15 Days | Hacker News Reader

China Builds 30-Story Hotel In Just 15 Days

singularityhub.com

116 pointskpantsman68 comments

Over the last year or two here on Hacker News I've seen several credulous, gee-whiz stories about China submitted from Singularity Hub.

http://singularityhub.com/tag/china/

I don't think that Singularity Hub, insofar as it curates stories at all, does a good job of curating stories about China. A lot of stories about China today, written by correspondents who don't know the Chinese language (as I do) and have contact with everyday people in China (as I do to a limited extent), read like stories about the United States housing market before the housing bubble collapsed in 2008. A minority of journalists knew from the beginning that the United States housing bubble was a bubble (I recall a Business Week story saying that way back in 2005), but lots of people kept saying that NOT investing in real estate was a chump move right up until the day before the market collapse in the United States.

Similarly, China's "progress" in building high-speed rail lines looked like an example to the world until a deadly crash

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2011/07/23/china-train-co...

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43865656/ns/world_news-asia_paci...

http://www.economist.com/node/21525419

that has now prompted doubts about the program among Chinese government officials.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-12-28/china-punishes-54-o...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-16345592

Much of China's new construction in recent years is not affordable to most Chinese citizens, and the government there is wary of a housing market collapse.

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-01-10/china-may-ease-p...

The P.R.C. government is also wary of popular discontent with regard to other issues,

http://www.npr.org/2012/01/11/144994861/china-targets-entert...

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/story/2011-12-28/china-me...

and censors all mass media

http://www.cfr.org/china/media-censorship-china/p11515

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-15615952

to such a degree that I wouldn't bet on current press reports based on Chinese media sources giving the full story of conditions there.

I'll add - China is different, so it looks like a land of contractions. One of them is how its government is on paper a monolithic entity, but does not behave like a monolithic entity.

The local governments like the bubble, because they get revenue from land sales, and probably get bribed by developers for approving new construction. The local government companies and departments also own (or control) a lot of land, and get to exploit that in various ways.

The central government (or the central party committee, who outrank both the government and the military - which does not report to the government) worries about the economy as a whole, and the stability of society. The buck stops with them. They care about the housing bubble, but with dozens of provinces, hundreds of cities, and third world government accountability (lots of stuff is done on paper, because no-one wants to be accountable) there's not much they can really do in a hurry.

I think you meant "land of contradictions."

China has these "ghost cities," which are built all over the place but nobody wants to live in. Whole, fully equipped cities built and then left empty for years and years because nobody wants to live there.

http://www.businessinsider.com/china-ghost-cities-2011-11

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/06/why-chin...

http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1975397,00.htm...

Can someone knowledgable in such matters explain to me why this does not indicate the chinese economy is headed inexorably towards a massive crash, especially considering the huge amount of fraud which we all know occurs there? Is it just to do with the amount of central planning and control they have?

(Also, which of the many and varied financial gambling instruments available in this modern world should I use to best profit from this contingency?)

"but nobody wants to live in"

Not true, people want to live there, most just can't afford it. In fact in some of these towns most of the units have been sold -- just not sold to people who live there.

"Can someone explain why this does not indicate the Chinese economy is headed inexorably towards a massive crash"

Probably in the same way that no one going to see Adventures of Pluto Nash didn't cause a massive crash in the US economy or even in the film industry here. I'll elaborate...

What percent of the Chinese economy is real estate? 6%?

What % of Chinese real estate do these ghost towns represent? 1%? 5%? 10%?

Are there 20 success stories (boom towns) for every ghost town? 5? 10? 100? None?

Ghost towns maybe a real and dangerous symptom of a coming Chinese crash. Or not. It's really hard to jump from "giant examples of waste" to "the economy is going to crash".

There are certainly other indicators that housing is a huge bubble in parts of China. There's also the inexorable and unbelievable growth that China has experienced over the last few decades. Growth like that has a tendency to make lots of things look like bubbles that aren't.

Lets not forget China's economy is overwhelmingly export driven; so the fact that they might decide to build towns and not use them- whilst seeming really odd- doesn't seem to me to be predictive of any kind of an economic crash.

The difficulties that western economies are having would seem a much greater threat to China's economy than this.

>There's also the inexorable and unbelievable growth that China has experienced over the last few decades. Growth like that has a tendency to make lots of things look like bubbles that aren't.

Thanks for the explanation. Same goes to the other replies.

There is a mindset of used being bad in China. Don't interpret "never lived in" as "not sold". Many of these cities have been sold but no one lives there because if the house has been lived in the value will drop. Some houses being flipped now as new are actually 10 years old but no one ever moved in.

I wouldn't be too quick to call a crash. Large cities become self-sustaining after a point. Except for Detroit (where the 'city' was mostly divested of wealth in favour of surrounding suburbs), there are few examples of modern cities failing without something catastrophic causing it.

Ignoring scam developments, because they happen everywhere, there isn't much chance of a crash unless everyone rich leaves China. Look at places of very significant development, like Chongqing, has a population of 20 million and housing for about 30 million at the moment. It's marked as one of the four 'direct-controlled municipalities' and it's likely to grow further because there are few other places for young educated people to move to out of the rural areas of Southern and Central China.

This isn't a defence of China, I'm no fan, but there are realities that must be considered. Urbanization is a real process, people will move from the country to the city seeking wealth. When you start with a huge rural base, like India and China, the urbanization process will send property markets berserk.

"Similarly, China's "progress" in building high-speed rail lines looked like an example to the world until a deadly crash"

Don't really want to get into a Good US - Bad China debate, but I wanted to point out bad use of stats you engaged in with this statement. It struck me because I am currently in Houston dealing with bad use of stats in the energy industry. Which flawed stats are being used as an argument against certain forms of energy.

Anyway... China's bullet trains have carried millions of passengers. As have HSR all around the globe. In that time, there was one crash in China, killing 40 people. The first, [as you were] the SECOND deadliest, HSR collision incident globally since Eschede-1998. That's actually a pretty good track record.

Again, I can tell you are pretty emotional about the China thing so I am not commenting on that... just saying that the HSR is actually pretty impressive when viewed from a dispassionate frame of reference.

I don't think the issue is statistics per se - the question is how much care has been taken in these infrastructure constructions.

It's not hard to lay tens of thousands of miles of shoddy track and run screaming locomotives down them. It's another game altogether to painstakingly design this system to be fault-tolerant and accept a wide range of failure modes.

The issue isn't that 35 people were killed out of millions transported, it's that the system seemingly had no account for a failure mode as simple as "train ahead loses power".

Getting something 95% safe is pretty cheap. Getting something 99.99% safe is monumentally expensive, and that really characterizes infrastructure development between the developed and developing world.

To circle back to the original point: OP is saying that China's HSR infrastructure was seen as an example to the world, creating controversy about the efficiency and cost of infrastructure in the developed world. That is, until you account for the fact that this infrastructure simply isn't built to the same standard as it is in the developed world.

For people who just want some idea on what things are like in China, I recommend ChinaSMACK: http://www.chinasmack.com/

Granted, it gives an internet-centric view of things, which doesn't do justice to all the disconnected rural parts of China, but at least it's a bit more real than what you get most other places.

I'm pretty sure most people who wrote about knew that economists were predicting a pop of the housing bubble its just that it had been discussed for so long people started wondering if or when it would come.

While an impressive engineering feat, this probably isn't equal to a similar sized hotel in the US.

Having lived in a new and quite upscale (rent was 8K RMB/mo, apartment sold for $500k USD) Chinese apartment in Beijing for a couple years and visited many others I can attest that the build quality is absolutely awful. The stuff they're building will not last. Buildings in China are built for instant gratification using the lowest skilled labour available with fit and finishings that only look good from a distance.

This is why PPP GDP adjustment is such BS. The argument goes that you have a skyscraper in Shanghai and one in New York you have a skyscraper's unit of wealth in both places, though the one in Shanghai costs half as much to build. Therefore you double the GDP gor China (figures for illustration) in order to account for this purchasing parity issue. Problem is, that the skyscraper in Shanghai will last a fraction of time that the one in New York does. China is the land of McMansion skyscrapers.

Web Urbanist just covered a dangerous and common Chinese demolition method. The article mentions an apartment building that was demolished the same year it was built (2011) due to poor planning. http://weburbanist.com/2012/01/08/high-anxiety-rooftop-excav...

That article specifically says "Believe it or not, in China at least, demolition via rooftop excavator is the safer, cleaner, and above all cheaper option."

But yeah, that looks crazy.

Thank you very much for this link. I enjoyed it enormously, for some reason.

I can corroborate this. I had a newer 3,000 RMB per month apartment in Beijing. So many things we take for granted (hot water anywhere other than the shower, plumbing being inside the wall instead of running along the baseboard, carpeting or tile in the hallway) just aren't there.

When you're in China, you'll see rows of constructions cranes --there's an incredible building boom. I don't know the details of the construction labour market, but I can only imagine that there's a real skilled labour crunch. (There's lots of workers, but not so many skilled ones.) So the building will go up quickly, but it won't compare to a western building.

That said, the buildings aren't all that bad compared to recent history. In the 2008 earthquake, the more modern buildings survived much better--it was the 60's cultural-revolution-era buildings that were death-traps.

I was wondering that myself. I'm not so sure that putting something like this up that fast doesn't present dangers.

I am involved with a construction Company that operates in the Gulf area. The average hotel we have been involved with is about 50 stories high.

On a multinational Team from design to construction it can take a minimum of 36-50 months. Yes time can be cut -- certainly not to 15 days -- but not with the way large developments are currently build. The average rate of floor construction (with a prestressed slab) is 4-7 days, so the absolute minimum time required to get just the structure going will be >57 weeks. The average rate to get a single bath tub approved by the Consultant, Engineer, Client, Finance etc., is normally 3 months. To get a Hotel room approved down to the last fitting, carpets, access systems, IPTV, media hub, lighting, air conditioning and everything co-ordinated is anybody's guess, but again not less than six months.

On the current Project we are just finishing (5 luxury hotels), we have over 100 km of steel piping just for fire protection and chilled water for the air conditioning systems. There are over 50 systems involved, such as data, IPTV, WI-Fi etc. At peak we had over 5000 people working on the Project.

No chance in hell that an up to standard hotel can be finished in 15 days.

Their standards are different.

Also, they're being slightly disingenuous by omitting the time it took to fabricate all of the various parts that they then assemble on site.

Still, it probably comes down more to standards. I really like this article from the Atlantic comparing Japanese and Chinese methodologies for filling a plane with fuel:

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2007/11/-quot-...

A Way vs. The Way.

There was an old news article talking about how this Chinese guy started a factory. He had a plot of land, and went out with a contractor, paper pad in hand, roughly drawing the outline of the factory, as well as where the offices were going to be.

Construction started two days later.

No approvals, no drafting, every decision was made on the fly. That's what I call agile.

Agile indeed. It works with software b/c you can change it on the fly. Once you pour concrete and realize you made a mistake you're in for real problems.

I'm sure they'd have change in requirements, but that happens in any project. However, the obvious distinction here is there is no development application, or approvals from government. This is the wild west.

China assembles a 30 story hotel in just 15 days. China builds a 30 story hotel in an unspecified length of time.

edit: Sorry this warranted downvotes. If I were trying to build a prefab home for myself, I wouldn't count the "build" time as time from parts arriving on site. I feel it to be disingenuous. There's a lot more to the process than just assembly of parts. Its definitely interesting that they can assemble things this quickly, but the fact that they can do this is not new. Example: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1911060

Regardless of how much work was done offsite, it's still a unique feat to see an empty lot turn into a 30-floor skyscraper in such a ridiculously short amount of time; there's no doubt it's mentionworthy. However, as others have mentioned here, it doesn't look like anything to cheer about in terms of real quality or durability. There's a reason our methods take longer.

I suppose my point is that it isn't unique, either. They've been doing this for years and there are videos galore including past submissions on HN as I linked.

Furthermore, the 15 days is itself a bit low---notice in the video that by the time the clock starts, the foundations are already done and some parts of the first floor are in; the work continues after the 360:00:00 clock stops; and the last layer of cladding (dark instead of light, which in the finished photos extends to the top) isn't finished past the sixth floor.

Good summary by everyone above...China does many impressive things but examples like this are also possible due to lack of oversight, lack of regulation, and corruption (obviously the 'correct' level of oversight and regulation is a struggle in many countries, USA included).

My most recent stay in Beijing (20th floor of a hotel/condo building) seemed wonderful (all things considered) until I discovered an oddity one day. My door had no way to disable the door lock from the inside except by key. It took a minute for the implications of this to dawn on me (hint: there is a fire, you can't find your keys, and you like to keep your door locked). Took about 5 weeks before I even noticed the issue (one day I went to leave the apartment and couldn't find my keys and I went to talk to the front desk and realized I couldn't leave the suite).

THIS SCARES THE SHIT out of me. And it is NOT just in China, Lots of European countries have this. We went to Italy and Greece and the doors were like that.

Huge multiple dead bolts, heavy metal doors, and you need a key to get OUT as well as in. It was at that time that I was thankful for the rules we have here in the US. At the end of our stay in Athens Greece we actually got locked IN the apartment building at 5am because the owner of the building instructed us to simply leave the keys on the table and close the door behind you. When we got down to the door to the hall of the apartments we couldn't get OUT.

So in Europe you better have a key on each of your family members or else you might get locked IN.

You might also want to check out an article the BBC is running today which says that sky scrapers are linked with impending financial crashes. Specifically mentions China.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-16494013

Apparently, whole cities are being built in anticipation of people wanting to live there (ie, filling demand which doesn't exist).

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/robertpeston/2010/11...

Filling demand which doesn't exist? China has an impoverished farmer/rural class to the tune of 600,000,000 - 700,000,000 people, and it is incredibly difficult to transition from a rural pass to a city pass, from what I've read. Difficulty in transition, to me, implies that their is a much greater demand to move into cities than the government is willing to allow currently. Why make it hard if you're begging people to move in?

EDIT: I know little of China, I'm posing this question in earnest to learn more!

The demand doesn't exist because those people can't pay to live in a brand new sky scraper. From what I have seen those units are in the 10's to 100's of thousands of dollars. Way outside the budget of a rural Chinese person.

Getting official residency in a city requires applying and fulfilling whatever (rather arbitrary) requirements the local government imposes.

It's in their best interests to be picky about who they let in, so the bar is set very high; Usually you need (1) a local employer to sponsor you, or (2) bribe one of the right office employees.

Both of those are beyond the means of most rural peasants. Those who have the money to afford city life but not the right connections to get the right papers will move in anyways, technically illegally.

As long as you don't cross the wrong person and get caught, you can often survive that way for quite a long time.

Disclaimer: My Mandarin is awful, and I'm almost certainly glossing over a lot of details, but that's a rough summary of what I've seen.

You may not realise how many cities there are in China, and how many "towns" and "villages" have skyscrapers. Think about London, which is half a dozen different cities which all grew into each other.

There's a big demand to live "on the right side of the tracks". Everyone wants to live in the "city" part of the city, not the bit that was once zoned "village", with all China's discrimination against poor rural people, and it may still have a particularly incompetent and corrupt government. But people will get a lot less picky when they realise they actually have to pay back the loans.

Alternate hypothesis: skyscrapers take a long enough time to build, are built frequently enough, and recessions/crashes happen often enough, that it's inevitable that there would be a few skyscrapers built during most recessions.

In order to link the building of skyscrapers to recessions/crashes, they'd have to show the inverse -- that fewer are built during financial good times. They don't mention that in the BBC article.

Skyscraper construction is actually quite fast, even if you don't do it modularly. A floor should only take a day or two for initial construction, with other trades following behind and adding cladding, electrical, etc. Steel beams are modular, after all.

The slow parts are preparing the foundation, which seems to be skipped over here in the timeline, and pouring and drying concrete bits, which this building doesn't have.

It would be more accurate to say the hotel was assembled in 15 days. Most of the pieces were already built off-site.

It took 15 days for the final construction. Most of the building was prefabricated off site. Any ideas how long this stage took?

As quick as you're willing to pay for it because prefabricated stuff can be done in parallel.

I think a more important question to me is how much does the prefabricated parts already contain, as in does it make the construction complete.

Usually the walls, roof, windows and doors are fairly quick and easy to get in, the other half of the cost goes into the rest of the detail. This includes carpets, light fittings, plugs, plumbing, tiles, carpets, cupboards, curtain rails, kitchen bits, skirting boards, toilets, towel rails, etc. and all the labour involved in setting that all up.

I can see great potential gains in doing this off site in an assembly line type fashion instead of inside of a building.

Yeah, it's a bit deceptive to say "15 days to build". The modules surely took less than time than building from scratch, but still a significant amount of time.

Yeah, kind of like saying you have to count all the time spent on ruby, rails, and all the gems you're using when you do Rails Rumble.

Making construction modular and plug and play is a hugely important innovation.

True but nothing new. We've had it in the US for decades for all types of construction.

Not having to care about health & safety is certainly one factor in the speed of Chinese builders, I've seen some crazy stuff in the preperation for consumer events.

How do they get the crane off the roof of the building when its finished?

The cranes are designed to be easy to dismantle. For bigger cranes, they'll actually bring up a smaller crane which will be used to lower the parts of the bigger crane.

This has a few more details and links:

http://www.ehow.com/how-does_5787150_cranes-removed-sky-scra...

But how do they get THAT crane down?

With a series of progressively smaller cranes until finally:

http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2610/3699889213_30575a56d0_m.j...

With a pocket one, obviously!

turtles, all the way

The shaft of the crane becomes the elevator shaft and they break off the top and move it with another crane.

In reading the comments it looks like I'm in the complete minority here, but I think this was impressive.

People are mentioning that there will possibly be problems with the hotel, or a story of how a similarly constructed hotel failed in one way or another.

However, once the company constructs 30 of these hotels all of these bugs will soon be worked out. It is the fast iteration and refining of the process that will eventually enable this company to create a building that is close in quality to what takes much longer to build in the US.

tldr; Construction companies in China are able to act web startups in the US. This will give them an advantage in the long term.

Building construction is one of the few industries that I do NOT want to ever act like a US web startup. Along with airplane construction and medical devices.

To contrast:

It's been almost 4 months of construction here in London, ON (Canada), building a new residence. They haven't even laid the foundation yet, and all I see every day when I walk by, is about 9 people smoking for every 2 people working.

Even more of a contrast is the New York City Subway extensions that are proposed to take 10 years!

Apples and oranges. At least until recently, NY was known for having some of the fastest building construction teams in the world, and some of the only ones able to put up a story every two days. by having them pouring on one side of the floor and drying on the other.

This didn't seem to make much sense in desert (or wherever they were building it) but it makes sense in populated areas. You reduce noise and pollution from one year to one week and that's great. Also workforce has probably better conditions under the roof than on the roof.

Also, similar video from 2 years ago:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPSxt5A23MI

Hopefully it's more solidly constructed than the Shanghai bridge that was made out of trash: http://www.weirdasianews.com/2010/02/05/shanghai-wonderbridg...

The first thing I thought of was this: http://gizmodo.com/5304233/entire-new-13+story-building-tips...

Just like the punching bag, also made in China, that turned out to be stuffed with garbage instead of padding --

http://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/n74vq/so_i_bought_a_2...

"Tofu Hotel"... despite the marketing propaganda.

I really hope these projects are publicized enough so that when I am in China, I can avoid these buildings and the buildings next to them, in case they collapse and cause a domino effect or sympathy collapse.

I like to look at this article as a response to the linked one.

http://weburbanist.com/2012/01/08/high-anxiety-rooftop-excav...

Although the preconstructed aspects of this make the figure less impressive anyways, I am also deeply unimpressed with any large projects like this that China does fast or cheap, due to the low quality and safety standards typical there.

So what about security ? As i can see (from the video), they didn't covered the steel structure with any fireproofing material ?

Now let's do the same thing without human intervention !

but how fast will the fully-plaster structure come crashing down?

Yes, but which would you rather be in when an earthquake hits?

And they tear them down just as quickly: http://weburbanist.com/2012/01/08/high-anxiety-rooftop-excav...

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