Recently I went to China. I visited Hubei Province, where me and a group of nursing students stayed at Hubei's University of Traditional Chinese Medicine in Wuhan, which is in Central China. We were there for a crash course in TCM practice's such as massage (painful but so worth it), acupuncture tongue reading and pharmaceuticals.
Some of their names for diseases still haven't found an appropriate translation to English, as we found out with 'fat disease', 'cold disease' and 'clammy disease'. Or perhaps they just aren't as sensitive as we are in the West.
While travelling 9 hours on the bullet train from Wuhan to Shanghai, I eagerly pulled out my New Yorker magazine, having not found time to delve into the sacred pages that fill me with longing for New York and disdain for the small-townness of Melbourne. Anyway. The feature article covered the bullet train rail disaster near Wenzhou on July 23rd 2011, detailing how the governments cover up of the accident in international media exposed the underlying corruption. Firstly, I thought, shit, this is probably the most inopportune time to read this. Secondly, though, what better time to read it whilst hurtling through the Chinese countryside at 200km/h and having extremely vivid visions of the horror that had occurred. I'm a sucker for punishment.
China is trying to expand and grow so quickly it can't keep up with the demand, so dodgy builders who have little or no experience are hired, they are using building materials that are far from safe form the structures of houses, roads and train lines. All this is very very scary considering the millions of people who use trains and roads throughout China. All this is due to an astounding amount of corruption at nearly every level of government, and the way projects are continually outsourced to different companies as a profit-making scheme, so much so that the original project managers have absolutely no idea who is actually running the site and how its being managed. Out of sight- out of mind, until shit gets real and hundreds of people die because Wang Fou didn't know how to wire the traffic lights properly that stops trains from colliding.
All these frightening building practices is seen in every fraction of Chinese industry. Yesterday in Guangzhou- a major IT and Business capital, a few building collapsed into a 'sink hole' that is believed to have been caused by subway construction underneath.
Hopefully this could serve as a wake up call, not just for the Chinese but also for its major international business partners. If they continue to build at the rate they are without the standards needed for safe and long-lasting infrastructure, a lot more than just a few buildings are going to disintegrate.
In the long run, it saves money to do things properly so there is no need have to rebuild piles of rubble because they didn't do it right the first time.
