Masonry Magazine October 1998 Page. 32
The only power equipment on many construction sites in China is an old-fashioned concrete mixer. Hidden under the colorful tarp are a few building materials. Similar tarps were hung around this site in a lackadaisical effort to keep out visitors. All a visitor had to do, however, was push the tarp aside. The workers responded with smiles.
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32 MASONRY-SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER, 1998
The only power equipment on many construction sites in China is an old-fashioned concrete mixer. There are no safety guards around the belt. If a hand gets caught in the pulley, there is always another worker who can be hired.
Concrete from the mixer is poured into hand-pushed wheelbarrows and guided along rickety planks to the makeshift elevator where it is hauled to the desired floor by men yanking at ropes. Why use a motor when there are so many people available to work? Construction trailers are also missing from Chinese building projects. If there are meetings at the site, the participants squat on the ground around a smoky brazier where hot water for tea simmers most of the time. Lunch and the infrequent tea breaks are also held outdoors around the fire.
When work goes on all night, as it sometimes does, there are a couple of dinky electric lights strung up at the work level. The rest of the site is pretty much in darkness, so those who are pushing the wheelbarrows had better know the territory to avoid falling into an excavation.
What would be done by one man and a machine in the west requires a large crew or a long time, or both, in China. From a train running between Shanghai and Suzhou, tourists could see a pile of crushed stones being moved from the bank of a canal to the nearby railroad track bed. Two men balanced a long heavy pole between them on their shoulders, supporting a basket of stones. The stones had been shoveled by hand from a barge onto the ground, shoveled into the basket, and would also be spread around on the rail bed with shovels. Here, a machine could accomplish the whole project in an hour or two. In China the work lasted a week.
Outside a very westernized hotel, elegant by anyone's standards, a bunch of men were digging trenches for the.