According to Beijing’s vice mayor Ji Lin the city has currently 9,700 construction sites, something like the equivalent of construction all over Europe. It is one of the major causes of pollution – dust particles in the air. Beijing has imposed several rules: all trucks that transport soil and dirt must be closed, bare land, soil and sand needs to be covered by tarp as well as entire buildings under construction, wrapped in canvas as big boxes. Access roads to construction sites must be kept clean. You can see workers scraping the soil and cement off those roads and often spraying water, even on the truck tires. Well, those are the rules. It does not stop construction sites producing clouds of dust as workers often dump rubble “the easy way”. The never-ending construction next to Julong Garden is a typical example. We are constantly covered under layers of dust, opening windows is not recommended and cars need to be cleaned several times per day.

I caught the workers in the act a couple of days ago, simply dumping dust and rubble from the building (see the highlighted circle). The clouds are easy to see and it is no fog…

After a late evening in our living room the previous night we were sleeping “like a log” around 2 am on Thanksgiving Day when I heard Valerie screaming at our bedroom door. I jumped out of the bed, groggy, did some steps and found myself with my feet in the water. Opening the door, Valerie pointed at the floor, the staircase, the living room – water and steam everywhere and the sound of water rushing down the staircase. I went into the dark living room, switched on the lights (in retrospect, not the best of ideas being barefoot in the water) and was shocked – the large room was like a sauna with a 2 meter high jet coming from the heating. Fortunately I managed to quickly close the taps and it stopped. The view was scary. In the living room sofas, carpets and everything on the floor were in over 1 cm of water, water had also covered half of the bedroom (and the carpets) and had went down from the 3rd floor up to the 1st floor. Fortunately all floors and the staircase are in stone and the two lower floors nothing much was standing in the water. I shouted to wake up Sun and asked Valerie to wake up the maid and start cleaning up. Turned out the maid’s husband was just visiting, so we were the six of us scooping up the dirty water into buckets and cleaning, removing anything from the floors that could be damaged. After one hour of frenzy, the bedroom, staircase and the two lower floors were dry, only the big silk carpets were still soaked. We opened the windows and went to bed. exhausted – to be ready for a busy day with many meetings.
At 9 am the problem was solved – a badly connected pipe and we could switch on the floor heating and the radiators to help the carpets dry. All in all we were very lucky and nothing much was damaged. The carpets even came out more clean.

I actually had this nightmare since long – that something like this would happen. The workmanship here is awful – sloppy, unprofessional and ignorance. Top that off with worsening quality. Really frightening. As a result, every year something busts or needs fixing.
We actually had the same problem in our other apartment in June, before it was rented. The bathroom was just finished when… the hot water connection to one of the sinks ruptured. As there was nobody, the bathroom was totally wrecked and the master bedroom seriously damaged. As usual, bad quality material.

When I complain I get the answer “it is already the best on the market”. Of course, as an engineer I am supposed not to understand all this and the Chinese around me seem constantly ignore my advise. Frustrating. Chinese can be so stubborn and ignorant in construction. No wonder most buildings are old after barely 5 years and renovation is needed every two years.
I will give more samples of the poor consumer goods on this blog. Keep posted.