Construction in China

I love construction sites in China. They are fraught with opportunities for death and dismemberment for construction workers and pedestrians alike. It gives me something to pray about at night. The construction staging area is always the street. No barriers to protect citizens, no warning signs, no hard hat areas. Heavy cranes carrying multi-ton HVAC systems stretch across crowded intersections with an unwitting population casually passing beneath the freight. The bamboo scaffolding travels to the job site on the back of a construction worker's bike as does everything else that ultimately winds up in or on the building. I have never seen an 18 wheeler or a flatbed in Shanghai.

Unless the building is constructed by foreigners and is a fairly large development, the workers live in the building until it is complete. I witnessed this first hand during my first year in China while workers constructed a high rise across the street from my house. There is no electricity or plumbing until the building nears completion. As a result, the whole area around the building smells like a sewer lateral has broken. Or like stinky tofu. This is particularly nice in July and August.

After the workers had completed the building, they expanded the street in front and poured a area of concrete about one lane wide. They finished up in the evening and thought they were done. Until a woman drove her car right into the wet concrete. It didn't occur to anyone that a barricade might be appropriate. The wet concrete was virtually invisible to all but the spectators who were keeping tabs on the construction.

When westerners visit Shanghai for the first time, they frequently liken it to “New York on speed”. There is no question that Shanghai is one of the most exciting places to live in the world – vibrant, thriving and bursting with life. Architectural discretion is unfettered. If the building is built and designed by a Chinese company(ies), it will be constructed with pink or white bathroom tile on the outside which will never be cleaned no matter how long the building is standing. If it is built by anyone else, anything goes. My colleague and I were discussing a certain building which contains what appears to be a long glass (??) cylinder that stretches horizontally above the roof and leads nowhere. He aptly refers to it as the habitrail. There are all manner of buildings in Shanghai – buildings where the whole front acts as a TV set (all 80 floors); buildings that light up in various colors; buildings of all shapes and sizes made out of just about everything you can imagine. Buildings that blink, buildings with stripes, buildings that are ridiculously ornate, buildings that say Old Communist Russia, buildings that say Old Communist China….

Since OSHA isn't active in China, anything goes on the job site. No goggles, no hard hat, no problem. Just remember to return the tools when you finish welding the 5th and 6th floors together.

Construction workers have it hard in China. They are inevitably from the countryside and they are unskilled laborers. They keep just enough money to live on in the city (which is food and perhaps a pack of cigs) and the rest goes home to their families in the country. They frequently don't get paid by their Chinese contractors and there is little recourse. As you have probably gathered, job safety isn't on the radar screen in China yet.