Shanghai's Skyline May Be In Big Trouble

Corrupt official oversight combined with shoddy construction materials threatens to set the Shanghai skyline crumbling and tumbling down. In the rush to growth, China's miracle cities may have cut some corners that are better left uncut.

Of the 52 batches of steel tested by the Shanghai Industrial and Commercial Administrative Bureau, 27 were too light to meet China’s legal standards. Some batches were nearly five times lighter than the legal standard, meaning that they were less than the weight of iron, steel’s primary ingredient. “If your steel is less than the weight of iron, that’s pretty incredible,” says Christopher Earls, professor of civil engineering at Cornell University. “That means you’re replacing the iron with something else, so what you have isn’t really steel at all.”

The bureau ordered construction sites using the inferior steel to halt work, but, troublingly, did not publicly reveal where it was being used. Adam Minter, a Shanghai-based journalist who blogged the story after it broke, asked, “What will happen to twenty-year home mortgages taken out on Shanghai apartments which will only last—structurally—for ten years? At some point, I’m pretty sure this is going to become an issue.” After the collapse of substandard schoolhouses during this year’s Sichuan earthquake, tremors of which were felt in Shanghai, the prospect of something similar happening to an urban high-rise isn’t an issue anyone should take lightly. _ForeignPolicy_via_PowerandControl

This is likely to be only the tip of the iceberg. Many inferior batches of steel were likely to have been never tested, or to have been passed on to finished construction (along with the appropriate bribe). The extent to which China is still a third world country is not widely appreciated in the west.