Modern apartment buildings and schools crumbled, smoothly paved highways buckled and bridges collapsed — their flimsy construction no match for the awesome forces of nature.
As the death toll soars from Monday’s quake in Sichuan Province, the scale of the devastation is raising questions about the quality of China’s recent construction boom.
“This building is just a piece of junk,” one newly homeless resident of Dujiangyan yelled on Wednesday, her body quivering with rage.
PHOTO: AFP
Her family salvaged clothing and mementos from their wrecked apartment, built when their older home was razed 10 years ago.
“The government tricked us. It told us this building was well constructed. But look at the homes all around us, they’re still standing,” said the woman, who would give only her surname, Chen.
Three decades of high-paced growth have remade China. But as the widespread devastation from Monday shows, the pell-mell pace has led some builders to cut corners, especially in outlying areas largely populated by the very young and the very old.
“This new economy in China is not going up safely, it’s going up fast, and the two don’t go together,” said Roger Bilham, a professor of geological sciences at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
“You look at the buildings that fell and they should not have fallen,” he said. “This is a story that has been repeated throughout the developing nations.”
New buildings in Beijing are built to exacting codes to withstand earthquakes.
However, “anti-earthquake standards are not as strict in places like Sichuan as in Shanghai,” said Ren Bing, an architectural designer at Hong Kong-based China Construction International Co.
Monday’s temblor flattened smaller towns in the disaster zone like Yingxiu. In Beichuan, entire blocks of apartments seemingly disintegrated. In Dujiangyan city, there was little evidence of steel reinforcement bars in the concrete rubble.
Other infrastructure old and new suffered as well. Nearly 400 dams, most of them small, were damaged across Sichuan.
Since the 1976 quake in Tangshan killed at least 240,000 people, the government has tried to improve building standards.
“China has been taking earthquake safety very seriously in the past 10 to 20 years,” said Susan Tubbesing, head of the California-based Earthquake Engineering Research Institute. “From what I understand, the codes China has adopted in the past 20 years have been good, solid, seismic codes.”
Chinese building codes are designed according to the level of shaking expected from a major temblor, said Claire Souch, senior director of model management at the consulting firm Risk Management Solutions, which is working with the Chinese to assess the damage.
In Sichuan, new buildings are built to withstand a shaking level of 7, Souch said.
But the magnitude-7.9 quake produced a shaking intensity of 10 near the epicenter, which usually results in total collapses.
“Essentially what happened is the actual ground shaking has far exceeded the design code for that region,” Souch said.
Another problem is that actual enforcement of building codes varies. The construction boom that has underpinned much of the stunning growth has also been an invitation for corruption, with officials and developers colluding.
In big cities, authorities generally enforce regulations. But that isn’t always true in smaller cities. And in rural areas, it’s out of the question, says Andrew Smeall, an associate at Asia Society’s Center on US-China Relations in New York.
A commentary in Wednesday’s state-run China Daily did question the staggering death toll, especially in schools wrecked by the quake, suggesting an investigation might find builders to blame.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion