Chinese Construction Design, Good Looking - Very Impractical

Over the past few months, I've been explaining to coworkers how badly designed so much of the modern china is...

A good example I always find, is to explain the sidewalks. I'm currently spending most of my time in Shenzhen, which is a very modern city, about 20yrs old. Here most of the sidewalks on buildings built in the last 5 years are polished marble....which you looks very nice and fancy, but it rains here a lot - and you're basically ice skating when you walk; so most people walk in the street. And as the pedestrian is 2nd class here, you best watch yourself or you'll be run over.

My office is one of the first buildings built in Shenzhen, it was completed in 1989; it's 4 stories tall - and was the tallest building in the city when it was built. Now nearly 19 years later, it's one of the shortest. All the buildings around us are at least 30 stories, often 60 stories. Another scary fact...they can build a 60 floor apartment building in 12 days here....how come so fast? Primarily because they're badly built, they work 24x7, and as people are an excess commodity here, they're easily replaceable.

The biggest problem here is that nothing is maintained, when it breaks it stays broken, the building across the street with the marble sidewalk, well 1/3 of it is cracked - will it ever be fixed, doubtful, they're just tear it down in 3-5 years and restart with another monolith.

The genius idea here is to build the entire building out of cement, great idea it's very strong, but crap idea because if you need to install wiring or such, you now have to chisel out crevices, install tiny conduits and re-cement. Here I am trying to get a new network installed and every room has a hub as there is no central wiring area, they're all daisy-chained to each other.

There's a lot of money in this city, it's a lot wealthier then last I was here(just over a year ago); more cars(not all buicks); starbucks, mcdonalds, crowne plaza. They money is being made here, as are 90% of all cell phones and sneakers. There's hope(fear in my mind) that the border between Shenzhen and Hong Kong will open soon, rather then in 40 years as planned.

The mass transit is well designed here, but that's because the Germans did it. If memory serves me correctly, a lot of Germans left Germany after WWII; some went to Argentina, China, and so forth. So until last year, the worlds fastest maglev train was here (310 mph), the subways run like Disney world 1 every 10minutes or so.

So with all this new money, and good transit system, can they improve the people...I don't think so. There's still a strong communist mindset here. Imagine if people had to pay for their own apartments and food? How about the invention of middle management?