Masonry Magazine October 1998 Page. 30
A Sidewalk Superintend
by Frank Bredell
Behind the elegant western style Bell Tower Hotel in the heart of Xian, a major city in China, a small crew is at work with picks and shovels digging trenches for the foundation of an addition. The man leaning on the shovel at left seemed to be the boss.
Many visitors to China have remarked that the whole country looks like one huge construction site. In big cities, wherever the eye turns, there are cranes looming over high-rise building projects. From one hotel window in Shanghai there were 16 cranes in sight. There may well have been more, but the distant parts of the city were shrouded in mist.
It isn't only big cities that are dotted by construction activity. There are projects in small cities and rural areas too, including the immense job of trying to tame flood-prone rivers. Smaller projects are often more accessible for a visitor and offer the greatest contrast with the way things are built here at home. It's hard to imagine that anything actually gets built, given the "technology."
The scaffolding put up during construction is made of bamboo poles instead of the steel pipes we are used to. The bamboo pieces, looking like Huck Finn's fish pole, aren't bolted together, they are tied with twine. This technique is used not only on low buildings, but also on those rising 10 or more stories high. From the ground it's hard to determine how tall a building being constructed will be when it is finished. Chinese architects don't decorate construction fences with colorful renderings. You also can't guess the size of the building from the amount of material stored on the site. There may not be any supplies; they just sort of appear when needed. Probably a project is finished when someone decides it is and sends the workers home. It's another of those inscrutable mysteries of the Orient.
Despite the flimsy looking scaffolding, workers swarm up on it with no apparent worries about safety. Hard hats are seldom in sight, although the foreman may sport one, perhaps just to demonstrate his authority, or maybe so the members of his crew can find him in the mass of humanity usually found on a Chinese building site.
Safety shoes are made in China for export. They aren't worn in China. The general footwear may be sneakers, or more likely thongs-what we wear to the beach. Some of the crew may be barefoot. It doesn't seem to matter; there apparently are no safety standards or inspectors.
There is one concession to style: Chinese construction workers wear long-sleeved white dress shirts on the job. They don't bother with ties, and the shirts don't stay white very long, given the dust on most sites, but the flannel work shirts that are common here just aren't around.
Blue jeans are also scarce. Workers wear their second best (or maybe third best) dress slacks - usually black.
Most of the work is done with hand tools, which leads to large crews on projects. On a large apartment project in Xian, a major city, some dozen or more bricklayers could be heard tapping away overhead on one small section of a wall. They couldn't be seen, because the project, like many in China, was swathed in bamboo mats erected as screens, the way American contractors use plastic to keep off bad weather.
There is frequently only one piece of machinery on a site. That is a concrete mixer, an antique by our standards. The typical mixer is powered by a sputtering, noisy gasoline engine several feet away. A slapping leather belt transmits power from the motor to the Continued on page 32