Madness? This-is-CHINA!
(twitter.com)
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Welcome to the result of artificial growth and government interference. A lot of these properties were structurally unsafe, built with incredibly cheap materials that make the Soviet built housing blocs look like luxury. Demolishing them now probably saved the lives of people caught in a collapsed building incident later.
I don't know a thing about the situation on the ground, but I have to take issue with 'structurally unsafe'. Safety is relative. A relatively country does not have the resources to fortify buildings against ever more remote risks.
On the other hand, when you're rich, you can afford to minimize such dangers.
Unless the developers ran off with the money and built something with cardboard, I am not sure the buildings are 'unsafe' in any relative sense, let alone 'unsafe' absolutely.
There's a name for many of these modern Chinese construction projects. They're called tofu dreg. I'm sure you can guess their quality from that phrase alone. You won't need any Mongol siege engines to knock these down, you just have to push hard enough.
There was someone that went to film one of the ghost cities and decided to clap in the downtown just to hear it echo. The echo caused some panels to fall off of one of the buildings.
I can only imagine the actual quality of it.
>tfw you fart in your sleep and the floor collapses under your bed
It can kind of be the wild west out there, Tony.
If you look at the Wiki list for structural failures and collapses, note how many of the Chinese ones are "Building owner just randomly added shit to a building" - including, in one case, literally added the second half of the building on top of the first - and it had only been designed for the first half.
they replaced steel rebar with bamboo. threw trash into concrete mix to reduce cost. these were all scam investment properties. no one was ever going to live in them.
Almost literally, yes. Compacted refuse, cardboard scraps and loose sand covered with a thin layer of concrete have been documented instead of solid blocks of concrete before.
Chinese do build shit out of cardboard.. hell, they used empty oil cans as filler in pillars (probably not major support pillars). Im always scared when i go to china to visit relatives. Some did live in highrises.