It’s worth noting while their speed is impressive and admirable, there’s a major issue plaguing their construction - poor quality. A lot of work is done poorly and there is often corruption involved in the process. More often than not, durability and quality are overlooked for the sake of speed.
There’s a lot of media coverage of the poor quality.
There’s even a term for poor-quality work in China.
Overall, while high speed is great and I wish the US could have faster construction, it’s better to have a project that’s high quality, built properly and will last. That second part - quality and built properly cannot be said for a large number of China’s big infrastructure projects. It’s all about speed and showing “look what we can do” without regard to whether or not it’ll last into the next decade.
Take a look at those beautiful stone arches; and also that perfectly laid brick wall behind the arches. The Another perfect example of the Vitruvian Triad: usefulness, beauty and solidity.
Definitely no “TOFU-DREG” here…
BTW- that Tofu-Dreg link above was a great post by above by ALC11.
On a side note, shoddy originally described a fabric made from discards in fabric manufacturing. It was a term describing what kind of fabric cheap clothing was made from.
