generalspeaking

Speeding Toward Collapse

As though China's engineering marvel in the Three Gorges Dam which displaced millions of Chinese, and which appears to be affecting the geology of the area in ways not anticipated, including precipitating earthquakes with the dam structure beginning to represent an environmental hazard wasn't enough, the country's other ambitious engineering projects appear to be suffering unprecedented consequences.

That there are corrupt contractors and equally corrupt governors of various provinces, responsible for shoddy engineering, workmanship and inadequate materials use seems well enough known. When school buildings collapsed because of inferior materials and design, killing thousands of schoolchildren after the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan Province, Chinese were furious with their government.

A day after a massive earthquake in Sichuan Province, soldiers in Mianzhu cleared building rubble. Mark Ralston/AFP/NEWSCOM

Now another situation has emerged that points to problems surfacing in the country as a result of its spurning of safety codes in its rush to emerge as the new superpower of the modern world. Anxious to present to the world as forward-looking, prosperous and technologically advanced, the country has encouraged projects to proceed without due diligence.

In honour of the 90th anniversary of the founding of modern China, funds were made available for a myriad of proud projects.

One of them was a four-lane Xinsan expressway in Yunnan Province. Funding stipulations placed the road work in a difficult situation; it would have to open for traffic in advance of the June 30 date after which subsidies would no longer be available. What resulted was a magnificent looking expressway that exemplified shoddy, illegal construction that came through at an amazing speed to qualify for funding.

The road stretches in four lanes for 90 kilometres. But the asphalt sinks when stepped upon, and cracks appeared that could accommodate a watermelon. It was built through a series of hills well known for collapsing during the area's normal downpours. And no special reinforcement was added to the engineering formula. Permission to initiate construction was not received for months, but construction was embarked upon regardless.

The highway was opened to traffic without the requisite safety checks undertaken. The teams of construction workers were given one cardinal instruction: "work quickly!" Two days after the opening of the expressway there was a rainstorm, not a huge one in comparison to some that the region experiences, but enough to see the spanking new roadway collapse. In one area of the road, a bus plunged fatally into a valley when all four lanes in one stretch of road collapsed.

Elsewhere, the Beijing-to-Shanghai high-speed railway came to a sudden halt in a thunderstorm that left it without an electrical supply with passengers cooking in the stopped train without lights or air conditioning to relieve the swelter. To add to the misery of glorious plans to celebrate the anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party, the propaganda film Beginning of a Great Revival: The Founding of a Party, has been ill received.

The blockbuster film, playing in movie houses all over the country has been a decided dud at the box office. Movie theatres did their best to inflate box office sales figures, something denied by the China Film Group, which promises an investigation into the matter. Still, congratulations to China on its 90th anniversary celebration.

One thing: how to celebrate an ideology and a movement that succeeded in overturning an ancient culture, denying its magnificent heritage and history, and in the process through a violent, forced transition causing the deaths of millions of people... ?

Labels: China, Economy, Political Realities, Technology, Traditions

posted by Pieface @ Tuesday, July 12, 2011