Nick Beaton, May 18

Nick Beaton, May 18

China is a country that is literally under construction. Before I traveled to this country I heard a statistic that in order for the economy to meet electrical demand China puts online one new power plant per week. I thought the economic expansion idea was rubbish and over exaggerated. But now that I have had the opportunity to witness the scale of construction these ideas have changed. The scale of the building projects is absolutely mind blowing. There is so much building underway that to make the statement that there is more buildings going up than the whole city of Philadelphia is not an over exaggeration. From the bus we viewed one development project where the contractors had just completed about 30 very large buildings. Next to this they were constructing about another 18 buildings while simultaneously in the process of digging the foundations for another 20 buildings. These sorts of sights can be seen all throughout the city of Chongqing. Whenever I go to the center of the city, which is called “Jiefangbei”, I take a 360-degree look at my surroundings. The view is always breathtaking because as far as the eye can see there are massive buildings across the horizon.

My personal favorite component of Chinese construction is their mix of old and new methods. For example, near the edge of the city limits we witnessed the construction of a segment of a superhighway. The crews were in the process of constructing a massive 4-lane industrial highway complex. There were multiple pieces of industrial equipment throughout the worksite, but all the workers we viewed were using shovels. There must have been about 100 people leveling a roadway gradient by shovel. Furthermore, the way for the construction crews accessed the worksite was a bamboo ladder. The manpower is so abundant in China that their methods are radically different from American construction. I sure would like to see a union boss leader’s face if he saw a bamboo ladder on an American worksite.

The Chinese culture and daily operational methods are vastly dissimilar to the American way of life in more than just construction methods. This is obvious in their mundane daily tasks. For example, the trash disposal methods alone are extremely different. In the States restaurants place their trash in receptacles and it’s illegal in most cases for them to give away their discarded food. However, China is a bit different. From what I have seen, the restaurant employees place their trash in loose heaps on the sidewalk. Then the peasants come along and select whatever items they want, like food or plastic (which apparently they receive .5 Yuan for each bottle). Then in the morning armies of people who are employed to sweep the streets came along and remove the remaining rubbish.