CONTRIBUTING OP-ED WRITER
JASPER RIETMAN
NOVEMBER 25, 2015
Murong Xuecun
HONG KONG — “It was like what we were told a nuclear bomb would be like,” Zhao Zhencheng, a truck driver, told the Associated Press. “I never even thought I’d see such a thing.”
In the still of the night of Aug. 12 in Tianjin port, some 90 miles from Beijing, an explosion ripped through a warehouse housing volatile chemicals, killing more than 170 people. Hundreds more were injured.
Chinese social media blazed with grief and indignation, but little surprise. “This will happen again, the only question is when and where,” a friend of mine said on the night of the disaster.
Ten days later, on Aug. 22, an explosion rocked a chemical factory in Zibo in Shandong Province. On Aug. 31, another Shandong chemical factory blew up. And on Oct. 12, two months after the explosion at the docks, an inferno tore through a different Tianjin warehouse.
Meanwhile, too many Chinese buildings prove to be less sturdy than a house of cards, collapsing to the ground, killing occupants. Among recent examples, a two-story building under renovation in Henan Province collapsed to dust on Oct. 30, taking with it 17 lives.
Mega-engineering projects are not immune from low building standards. From 2007 to 2012, 37 bridges reportedly collapsed, with a toll of 182 deaths.
These disasters are concealed by headlines touting China’s economic miracle. They are a result of the government’s love of mega-projects combined with rash planning, endemic corruption and careless construction, supervision and regulation.
As Chinese capital flows abroad, dangerous practices are at risk of being exported. China’s experience at home should serve as a warning to other governments and companies. Chinese firms may offer the lowest bid on an infrastructure project, but Chinese construction brings tremendous risks.
Teams of Chinese state-owned companies are rushing across the world to run super projects. In Sudan, a Chinese group is erecting a huge dam. In Ecuador, along with a dam, the Chinese are constructing an oil refinery. Chinese companies are helping to build bridges in Cambodia, Bangladesh and Kenya.
The construction and managing of nuclear power plants abroad are especially troubling. In October, President Xi Jinping and the British government signed deals paving the way for China to help build at least two nuclear power plants in Britain.
In China, however, nuclear power projects are controversial, with some observers saying that China does not take safety seriously enough. He Zuoxiu, a nuclear expert and Communist Party loyalist, has expressed dissatisfaction with the safety provisions, describing the government’s ambitious nuclear plans as “insane.” From everything we know of Chinese building and supervision practices, an accident in a Chinese nuclear power station is just a question of when and where.
There’s no reason to expect the safety standards and the quality of building to be higher in China-run projects abroad. As in China, most overseas projects will be managed by Chinese state-owned companies. Many of the site workers are imported, low-paid Chinese laborers, and the high-level company managers are mainly Chinese government appointees, or even government officials.
Chinese practices have not gone unnoticed. The transportation minister of Vietnam publicly criticized a Chinese company for its role in a series of accidents at the construction site of a rail line in Hanoi. The World Bank blacklisted at least 12 Chinese companies suspected of fraud and corruption, banning them from projects funded by the bank.
Corruption is rampant among company leaders. Take the case of the China National Petroleum Corp., which is financing the oil refinery in Ecuador. In recent years, a large number of company officers, including the chairman and chief accountant, have been investigated or arrested for corruption.
Although accidents linked to careless construction practices are certainly not rare in other parts of the world, China is distinct because the same kinds of disasters happen again and again. People keep dying, and they keep dying for the same reasons.
When disaster strikes, the Chinese government goes into emergency mode, organizing rescue and relief, demanding answers, and at every turn, displaying a staggering lack of professionalism.
During the Tianjin catastrophe, fire fighters did not know how to deal with a fire caused by a chemical explosion. And for the first 10 hours after the explosion, the most influential local TV station still broadcast soap operas; not a mention was made of fatalities.
The Chinese authorities have learned nothing from these frequent accidents. The only government competence on show is with information control: hiding facts, forbidding media reporting and rapidly closing social media accounts suspected of spreading “rumors.” The government’s instructions are always described as “brilliant” and the victims’ families are always “emotionally stable.” Each disaster becomes an occasion for government self-congratulation. Meanwhile, lessons go unlearned and responsibility unclaimed.
For many government leaders, Chinese corporate global expansion means a boost to their incomes. The Chinese government has greatly expanded its overseas investments, but the profits, we can fairly assume, go mostly to officials and their families. Rarely is a moral audit taken of these projects, which bring little benefit to ordinary Chinese people.
Chinese people have paid the heaviest price for this flawed system. Now that Chinese-style construction and management are going global, what price is the world prepared to pay?
Murong Xuecun is a writer whose most recent novel published in English is “Dancing Through Red Dust.” This article was translated by The New York Times from the Chinese.
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/11/26/opinion/beware-of-chinas-safety-record.html
