I find this fascinating and it’s not limited to China by any means. My suspicion is that it has a lot more to do with meeting demand at the pace of its increase rather than any particular lack of skill. My father and most of his siblings are Arab engineers, about half of whom were educated in the United States. A lot of Arab engineers are educated in the US, the UK, and Europe and often take their first job or two in these countries, so it’s not like the expertise pipeline is devoid of people who are taught about build quality. Yet you see shoddy builds on all kinds of products in the Arab world too, mostly in buildings in the Gulf states, many of which came up in the blink of an eye due to a constantly expanding need for housing.
When I was growing up in the UAE, the house we lived in wasn’t falling apart, but it had all of these truly thoughtless touches like light sockets where a built-in closet door couldn’t open if a lightbulb was installed (well, it could open if you were willing to smash the lightbulb.) My father, being a civil engineer, could never resist pointing these things out: Ramps that were too steep for wheelchairs, foundation problems, even poorly installed street signs (did you know that they’re supposed to bend or break away in case a vehicle slams into them? I didn’t.) But when you looked at who is ultimately responsible for the problems, it was always some building owner or company manager trying to save some money or who just plain didn’t care about the project. A relative minority of people in Gulf States buy land or property (the majority of the population is non-local) and so most of it is bought and sold by investors and businessmen,
There’s also a lot of situations where labor is thrown at problems. Build quality? Procedures? Efficiency? All of that kind of goes out the window when labor is cheap and expendable. My uncle was a mechanical engineer at a company in Saudi Arabia and he told me some horrifying stories about living there in general, and working at that company in particular. I guarantee you no company in the US is so cavalier about labor that it demands its workers jump over hot machinery that would kill them if they slipped and where the workers were barefoot in this part of the process because normal shoes made it easier for them to slip (they were not issued non-skid steel-toe boots). I really wish I could remember the details, but it sounded more like something out of Super Mario Bros. than a factory. No one gave a shit about these workers which came primarily from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Fortunately no one had been killed by that particular process, yet. My uncle tried to get them to reform a lot of the processes and make them safer but he ran up against a lot of managerial intransigence. In the end he moved back to the US and sold perfumes and colognes until he passed away from Lukemia at a relatively early age, but he couldn’t take living and working there.
There wasn’t a word for this kind of thing, but it was incredibly normal, and so people accepted a lot of it. Occasionally someone important would die, and since these countries aren’t democracies, certain processes and regulations would be put into place immediately by literal royal decree, but if it didn’t kill anyone with the right connections, or if it didn’t make the news, you could expect that it would never change. A lot of that is simply ignorance that there’s a problem. A lot of Americans live in older homes and old wiring and happily plug their trendy new refrigerator with a brushed steel-exterior into a two wire outlet with a “cheater” plug without any grounding. Even in Western democracies people don’t know why there’s a grounding pin, and that’s because most people don’t learn about basic electricity. What places like the United States have are functioning technocracies that function so far below the popular political process that they’re invisible to Americans until something like Flint, MI happens.
Bookmarked. Really fascinating. Thank you.
