Tianjin July 14-August 14
Rubble: Tianjin Normal University is Changing for You
As I said before, one of the first impressions we had of the university was of rubble. A great deal of construction was taking place on campus during our stay, and the debris from demolition lay everywhere.
Unlike in America, where a contractor would bring in a wrecking ball, a bulldozer, a backhoe, and couple dump trucks to tear down a building, at Tianjin Normal most of this work was done by hand.
At first, this seems odd. After all, an American firm could have torn down and shipped off a building in a week at most, while it was taking the Chinese months to hand-demolish a single building.
But when you remember that there are over one billion people in the country, a labor-intensive approach begins to make sense. Also, while the Americans would simply trash the building and cart away the debris to a dump somewhere, the Chinese carefully recycled everything they could from the building--window frames, beams, and bricks, lots of bricks.
So we see a good example of the "backward" (to our eyes) Chinese actually having a system that is superior to our own in many respects.
Inset Photo: The main camp of the demolition workers when we arrived on campus. Our dorm is visible in the distance (note the blue sign). In the foreground is the dwelling of a worker family. The children slept on the board beds located to the left of the picture. The canopy covered their eating area. Their main building was a single dwelling left standing from the rowhouses the group was demolishing. Our students told us these workers were undocumented laborers from the countryside, the equivalent of American "illegals" from Central and South America. In China, workers need permission to move to the city, so these workers work for the lowest wages and live on their work sites. You can see groups in the evenings at every work site in the city. In the background, you can see the carefully sorted materials awaiting removal.
You can't see him too clearly, but that's a mule hooked to that cart. Bricks were carefully stacked and then carted off.
The workers' camp on demolition day. It took a day to level the building and another day or two to stack the bricks. When you think of the labor involved, it's just amazing what all they accomplished in the time we were there.
The worker's house after demolition. In the evenings, we could see the workers out in the middle of all this rubble, watching television. It's a strange world.
Another project in progress during our stay was putting in a new sewer line. Again, hand tools and back-breaking, time-consuming labor. This ditch flooded with the rains, and the workers simply slogged on amid the mud and water.
2000 David Kimmel, Heidelberg College