Comment by poutine | Hacker News Reader

Comment by poutine | Hacker News Reader

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.

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