I should add that the problem was blamed on defective growth hormone from the West or Japan.
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There is also the musically related term “close enough for jazz”.
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I do find this a fascinating topic. My dad did a good job of beating out of me any “it’s fine” or “close enough” mentality. If we were working on the house and I would complain “well, no one’s going to see that” or “that little thing won’t matter” and he would reply “I will know it’s there”. There is just no substitute for personal pride in doing something well and the right way. The extent to which this is cultural or individual is interesting.
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@fuzzyfungus @HMSGoose @anotherone
I feel like it is largely related to corruption and authoritarianism vs meritocracy.
People build stuff like crap because they can pocket the money and get away with it.
The inspectors who should prevent this stuff and those who award the contracts are bribed.
The government officials protect their friends and family preventing recourse.
Sounds similar to America but on a much worse scale. I think we see the same things happen here, but not at the same endemic scale.
Unfortunately, any effective complaining may put you down the path of being labelled a political dissident, which is a health hazard.
An interesting comparison may be Hong Kong with all its new mega towers, and mainland China. Just to see the differences, but they would need to be targetting the same socioeconomic level of buyers to be comparable.
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It’s considered bad form to question your superiors. I’ve worked with brilliant Chinese engineers who will follow a specification to the letter even when it’s clearly wrong because that’s what it said to do.
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Yeah, not only is China going to have to rebuild everything but they also have to deal with the human and economic cost of infrastructure failing. There are so many examples of this already - buildings and roads collapsing, etc. It’s going to be a never-ending issue until government regulation becomes effective - until then, they’re building and rebuilding, over and over again.
From what I’d read, I assumed there was some inspection, in theory, but widespread corruption meant it rarely happened in practice (like Russia). No inspections at all? Yeeeesh.
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Forchlorfenuron urea’s apparently a hell of a thing, especially when combined with gibberellic acid.
But don’t worry, those watermelons were all chopped up and fed to hogs.
Bacon and cheese sandwich anyone?
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I’ve seen both, but the impression I really got when it came to normal Chinese people was not half-assing everything. In fact, this is about the farthest you could get from that. It’s hard to comprehend how small a single person is in China. It’s like the entry for space in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. You may think your commute to work is crowded, but that’s just peanuts to China:
There’s a Chinese saying that I love – “kick a tree, and three managers will fall out”. People work incredibly hard to get a chance at success. They work insane hours, having a kid and then barely seeing them. Many of them are just exhausted, but they put everything into their studies and work. You can see the effort that people put into recreation too – many spend a lot of effort perfecting their art or doing better at sport. When it comes to business though, think of art as an example. You could stay true to yourself and create works that you’ve put your soul into, and compete against hundreds of thousands of other art students for recognition. A small handful do get that recognition! OR you could work in an art factory and mass produce copies of recognised art to order:
Your potential market is unlikely to recognise and value originality in any case.
The fact is that the rate of growth and demands for cheaper goods (and pressure from countries like Indonesia with even cheaper labour) coupled with corruption mean that there’s a strong push toward things that appear good enough to sell. As for the construction, the growth is fast, there’s no great advantage in building to last and there’s a lack of skilled workers and quality materials, so stuff gets built incredibly fast at low cost, then sold off as quickly as possible. There is a demand for quality within China, but it will have difficulty finding its feet when people have more confidence in the quality of foreign products. A lot of the pressure to produce cheap Chinese goods comes from people higher up than the average worker, and the average informed worker isn’t exactly happy about it.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine an Olympic village – everywhere.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HMcZiWxX7o
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I think that authoritarianism (and paternalism) at play in every level of family and government are a really really big part in that and it makes it very hard to move the status quo or not conform.
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I’ve heard Chinese people say that since no one can really own land here, less effort/pride is taken in making certain the buildings are good quality. I doubt it’s the whole story, but this probably plays a part as well. (Of course, this shouldn’t apply to public buildings.)
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TFA addresses your questions.
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them’s offending words, almost close enough for flagging 
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Oh shit yeah. I know a guy who owns a chain of music stores in Zhongshan. In one of them, you flush the toilet by running the sink next to it, which drains onto the floor and into the shitter. I mean, why have two water supplies and two drains when you can get away with one of each?
That’s it. The guy above lives in a three storey frankenmansion built out of whatever materials were cheapest at any given moment. The interior deco is nice but schizophrenic. The outside is clad in bathroom tiles. I’ve no doubt that a building code exists and that consent is required for construction projects, but once you’ve got consent you do what the fuck you want and nobody’s going to check unless the building has already collapsed.
There’s no crime you can’t talk your way out of, no bureaucrat who isn’t taking liberties. It’s not even corruption, necessarily, just that nobody gives a shit. When my friend went to get his driver’s license renewed, the guy at the desk told him that his new photo was too ugly so he was just going to re-use the old photo.
I don’t doubt that this happens sometimes but I don’t think it’s the norm. China is the world’s biggest rat race, any chance of any success is vanishingly small. You help your friends and they help you. Maybe you’d call that bribery, I dunno, but what I’ve seen and heard about isn’t exactly an-envelope-of-cash-and-a-wink sort of thing.
I think in China if the rules did not bend, they would break. It’s a strange sort of freedom, if you have access to it. Also I’m not sure what someone unwilling to live with it could actually do about it.
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I work with Chinese engineers too. I call this phenomena “Evil Genie.” You will get exactly what you asked for, just not what you wanted.
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I distilled construction in China into the phrase “China gets shit done.” (place emphasis on the last two words as needed.)
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Is not a Chinese culture problem; you see the same in almost every “emerging” country and in all the ones that are not emerging anywhere.
On one hand, you get incredible amounts of flexibility and ingenuity, as people manage to solve problems that in the “first world” would leave them waiting for the proper tool and the proper expert; they just cant, so move on MacGyver, let me show how it is really done.
But as the article says, the downside of that is that everything is done in whatever fashion because one, you have to go with what you have, and two, if it doesnt work what is the problem, somebody is going to make another kludge down the line to fix it. There is no sense of having to do a proper job to proper specifications and proper quality, nobody appreciate that (till they are screwed).
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I do a lot of work for a company that gets its products manufactured in China. I’d say about 1/3 of the things they get back from the factory are broken, sloppy, or screwed up in some way. But they pay so little to manufacture them that they just have customers throw them away and they send them new ones. This seems like an incredibly weird way to do things, but what do I know.
Well, I do know that buying dog treats made in China nearly killed my dog (along with many, many others). Chabuduo, who cares if dogs die, just make these treats with dirt and rocks.
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was that blue bit supposed to a be a link, or is that a bug in Discourse?
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Weird! It had been a link, but somehow stopped working – I’m guessing a Discourse bug. I’ve fixed the link and it seems to be working now.
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