Chinese Construction: Saturday, May 26th

This morning I got up at 4:30am (when the sun comes up) to take some photos of Beijing in the morning around our Hostel. I did the usual walk to the Forbidden City (almost one mile). On the way there, it wasn’t hard to notice that the road was being paved. It amazed me how quickly they were accomplishing it. I knew that they had paved this road between the busy hours of the road and during sunlight: That is about 3 hours. The Chinese are able to accomplish great construction so quickly for two reasons that I observed: They have a large amount of manpower and they sacrifice quality for quantity. We already know that China’s population is huge, so it is not a surprise that they have more people doing one job. Instead of two or three men doing one job, there were eight or nine. With 3x as many people helping, the job was done 3x as fast. But fast doesn’t mean well done. The street was paved in 3 hours, but it wasn’t smooth, it wasn’t going to last, and it was barely an improvement. In other words, it matched the rest of the city… (which is beautiful in its own way of course)