This is scary! It's not just isolated in China. It seems that nowadays, a lot of people are taking huge risks by cutting quality to cut costs. But this is probably be more of stealing actually. The repercussions will come and when buildings start to collapse.....when will they ever learn? I read today some buildings collapsed in Saraburi, Thailand. And in the end, it's the poor again who pays the price.

Until the next time, cheers.

The Times, September 14, 2011 

China troubled by steel-thinning scam in building foundations

Chinese workers weld steel at a construction site in Wuhan, central Hubei province. Picture: AFP Source: AFP

 

THE exposure in the back streets of Zhengzhou of a "stretching" factory, employed in the nefarious trade of steel-thinning, has raised questions about the safety of China's buildings. 

A wave of troubling reports suggest that the Chinese construction industry is riddled with a practice that may have weakened millions of homes, offices and public buildings - with potentially fatal consequences.

It appears that there is a boom in such thinning operations, in which workshops stretch regulation steel reinforcement rods into a slimmer version and sell the excess metal on the local commodity market.

Typically, a construction company will take delivery of regulation thickness reinforcement bars that have been bought with the other building materials required for the job. But before the bars have even left the lorry, they will be sent to the local thinning merchant for illicit stretching.

A tonne of steel rods 10mm in diameter would normally be 1620 metres long. After an hour on the stretching machines, it will be 2000 metres long. The additional 380 metres is clipped off the end and sold for about $153.

The construction company takes a backhander of about $15 a tonne from the stretch merchant and hopes that nobody - especially not the building inspectors - will notice that the steel bar is now only 8.5mm in diameter.

One menu discovered at a recently-exposed thinning workshop in Henan province offers to diminish 6.5mm reinforcement bars to 6mm and 8mm to 7mm, reductions that Chinese engineers say could have dire effects on the integrity of buildings they are used in.

Beijing is pushing the country's local governments towards a huge increase in the construction of affordable housing for the new urban masses.

The poor profits and cashflow prospects of these projects has left developers less than enthusiastic and, analysts say, more likely than ever to cut corners and shave costs while appearing to stick to the architect's original design.

Those fears were realised last week when an inspection of a new affordable housing project on the island of Hainan found that four of the mega-projects had been using dangerously thinned-down reinforcement bars.

As many bloggers have pointed out, recently collapsed roads and bridges are often a few hundred metres from much older works of Chinese construction, built in less corrupt times, that have stood for decades.

But the greatest fears are that the reality will not be brought to light until it is far too late. A recent high-speed rail collision and cases of "glass bomb" windows tumbling from shoddily built skyscrapers serve as a grim reminder that the combination of breakneck construction speeds and endemic corruption will have a human cost.

Many believe that the efforts of Ai Weiwei to expose the way in which badly built "tofu" schools had collapsed in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake ultimately caused the authorities to "disappear" the artist earlier this year.

The emergence of the metal-thinning scam coincided with the drafting of new guidelines on strengthening "graft risk prevention and control" in Beijing, which tacitly admits that previous campaigns to rein in corruption have broadly failed to meet that goal.

The new campaign, jointly launched by the Ministry of Supervision, the National Bureau of Corruption Prevention and the Communist Party's Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, has said that it will particularly target infrastructure and construction projects where the effects of corruption are specifically felt to represent a threat to human life.