China's Tofu-Dreg Buildings are Getting Worse!

Recently a building in Jiangxi province China caught fire and unfortunately the fire hoses were not connected to water!

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Living in China for so long, we would like to share some of the comparisons that we have found between China and the west, and shed some light on the situation.

Every week, we take you to a new place in China on our bikes, cover a topic, and reply to your questions.

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Cartoon feat. Jüri Pootsmann - I Remember U
Track : Cartoon feat. Jüri Pootsmann - I Remember U

[jeffcole]

To think the same builders are in Africa and other needy countries, frightening.

[TheRubsi]

In my area in Germany we had a bridge that was in use for almost 60 years.
Suddenly some "nerd" did some calculations and arrived at the conclusion that the bridge would crumble if it was packed with trucks on both sides of traffic and they all would be breaking at the same time (due to shearing forces apparently).

Mind you that was not because th engineers back then were idiots, but because the trucks back then were not as heavy and because the bridges were not made as strong on purpose .. in case the russions invade with tanks (!!!!).
The whole bridge was shut and some extensive fortification was done to the pillars (at first they even wanted to tear it down and rebuild it).

It caused a few months of nightmarish traffic that lead to incredible anger and frustration for many people. But then i read in the news that a bridge in India collapsed and killed dozens of workers and passers-by. And I remembered why we have these rules. This video is yet another good reminder.

[retroarcadefan]

Its sickening that people can have so little morals to not even make simple life saving water pressure checks.

[davidmachemer]

You didn't even mention the common practice of locking fire exits shut with bicycle chains. I personally saw with my own eyes high-profile high-rise hotels downtown where the fire exits were locked with bicycle chains. Also a landmark 9-story shopping mall in Shanghai with fire exits chained shut. Chinese architects do not know how to properly specify fire exit doors or door hardware so they specify the wrong kind of door and lock and the building owner is at a loss how to secure the doors. So they chain them shut and probably pay off the fire inspector to let him know before he comes for an inspection so they can open the doors up. You truly take your life in your hands living in China.

[iloveplayingpr]

It's scarier how construction workers do this intentionally to go back to the same site and offer "repairs", doing it perpetually until they're caught.

[ohyeahwhat]

I've been following you starting with your original channel for 7 years. Nothing has changed, in fact it's gotten worse in China. Keep telling the truth, someone has to.

[theicepickthatkilledtrotsk]

Even a rotting Soviet-era panel building is preferable to the Tofu-Dreg and that is saying something.

[colleen]

Those inspectors are brave to show this.

[danthemancasey]

"Lack of ethics"... That's an understatement! Being in the electrical field, I could not sleep at night if my work put a single person in danger, let alone hundreds!

[topsuperseven]

This 'Tofu Crust' construction thing becomes far far more worrisome when a lot of Western civilization realize that just about 90% of everything you see in Mainland China was built less than 35 years ago and the 'expiry date' was 20-30 years. Obviously, Europeans have been rebuilding, refitting, rebooting massive infrastructure for many cycles now. In North America, they have also been through several cycles where their buildings, streets, bridges were dying out at 35-75 years and then replaced etc.
China has never had this before. You can put it this way: They have a LOT of people who now know how to put up a 30 story concrete and steel high-rise and install the elevators. They have almost NOBODY who knows how to replace the load-bearing frame around elevators or for that matter FIX and maintain the now aging elevators.
Even the simplest things. They have MANY that know how to put up a street lamp. When the streetlamp started pulling out of the sidewalk it was bolted too (yikes) we saw a dozen migrant workers clumsily pouring concrete all over the base. Chabiduo - good enough!
Then the big clump of concrete base start pulling away from the bricks and sidewalk... same crew back to mix and dump MORE concrete all over the base until a little mountain of concrete was 'good enough!'.
I watched as the elevator repairman stripped parts out of the working elevator to fix the broken one and like a bad comedy movie, a month later switched parts out of the 3rd elevator to fix the 2nd one. No joke.
Possibly worse than incompetence, a keen neighbor insisted that he actually saw the box of new parts (which are very very expensive) he thinks the repairman swapped old parts back-and-forth to say it was fixed but took the box of actual new replacement parts to sell somewhere else. Which would actually be standard cheating scams in China so it didn't surprise me.
We're now at a remarkable point where a MASSIVE MAJORITY of everything you can see, from bridges to streetlamps to highrises and sewage systems is ALL now entering its anticipated expiry date where it's predicted to start failing.
BTW, this isn't a secret thing as that long ago Chinese were also fully aware these were only expected to last 20 or 30 years. It's just that around 1995 they just had to fly, just get it done and then believed that it was fine because in 30 years China would be the richest most advanced Godnation on earth and heaven. By 2026 China would so easily replace all these things with new Godlike structures anyway.
However...
...it turns out that in 2025 they don't have the money to rebuild entirely new things and they don't have the money for the even more expensive difficult maintenance to keep them intact.
50 years ago, Las Vegas slapped up every spaceship looking casino and hotel as fast as they could slap them together knowing these were '30 year max' structures. The difference is that Las Vegas DID earn so much money that by the 1990s they demolishing them (even making them party events and movie scenes) and replace the entire site with new improved longer-lasting hotels.
China can't do that and even worse they don't even know how to fix them up to last much longer anyway.

[papasanzer]

Watching that worker scrape away a weight bearing pillar that easily is terrifying. I'm guessing someone got paid a hefty bribe when they "inspected" that work site.

[travellolo]

I am a fire code expert, retired after 30 years. Dry standpipe systems are no longer installed in new construction. Some cities stopped installing them after the mid 70s. Mostly because wet sprinkler systems are so effective at containing fires.

[JonMartinYXD]

The rebar snapping is terrifying. Rebar has one job: resist tensile loads. That building will collapse in an earthquake or even a strong enough wind.

[rockys]

This is why we get defective drywall in the US which costs millions of dollars in lawsuites. The world needs to learn the lessons to avoid chinese products/services. The sooner people learn the better off we will be without Chinese made products.

[awnage]

I was in Russian in the late 90s and thought that construction was bad. This takes the cake!

[watson]

40 years ago my dad would say, "they run this place like a Chinese fire drill". Stores, restaurants, etc. I never knew what he meant, till now.

[andyan]

dry riser is something else.
there is still a water conenction to the main, but the main is filled with air. when you start flowing, the air is forced out first, and then water is allowed to flood the system.
these are used in areas that freeze, so there isn't frozen water in your mains.

this is obviously not a dry riser system, and water shoudl be flowing out of these hoses.

[trandkiet]

It was GREED, not a shortcut. I think that they skimmed the cements and pocket the money when they built those structures.

[SeruraRenge]

God this reminds me of Russian armories. The armorer is always selling off shit to make some side profit, and when the inspector comes around asking how much he has, officially he has 50 fully functional T-72s, just need a little maintenance and they're good to go (spoiler, he doesn't have that many left), so he just says he has 50 and the inspector doesn't want to actually do his job or worse, take the heat if he has to report back that there's no longer 50 there so he just writes down that that there's still 50 without checking. And then Russia gets into a war and it turns out they had way less materiel than their reports said they did.

[Bluesmata]

Love you and laowhy86's content. 👍