The way the Chinese economy is growing and the increasing expansion of their major companies (Huawei, Haier, Lenovo etc) overseas make it pretty much certain that China is going to dominate the world economy in the next 20 to 50 years. 
The Japanese never learned to change (despite producing fantastic technology) and the Americans are, well, Americans. As for Europe, they're still talking about it. The plan, as I understand it, is to create a consultative body to identify and examine factors which may hold lessons about where Europe should be investing its massive energies. Will the last one out please turn off the lights. So it looks like the Chinese economic tsunami will carry away all before it.
But when you actually look at the way China works, and more importantly the way their people work, it makes you wonder what kind of world we're heading into. Now this is NOT a racist issue. Americans, Brits, French, Aussies, they all have their foibles and odd ways of doing things. But there is the sense with those guys (especially the French) that they know where they're going and why. And they have systems (even the French) to sort that all out.
But the Chinese, they worry me, frankly. While there is, I'm sure. some mega-strategy out there to drive all this forward (after all China didn't get where it is today by being organic), it seems that the plan never really gets the buy-in of those executing it at the rock-bottom layer. And more often than not that means the construction sector.
Now many strangers to this part of the world, especially Americans and Europeans, gasp in awe/horror at the way Chinese builders can use bamboo scaffolding 
towering up to 30 floors high (or much higher in these IFC2 days). That comes, I guess, from a combination of disbelief that it's safe and an unthinking conviction that the way 'we' do it, ie with metal rods connected by solid metal connectors, must be the safest way, otherwise we wouldn't do it that way, would we? But given the climatic and cost pressures here, the fact is that bamboo is safe; indeed it has greater resilience in the face of high winds (it bends!). Otherwise, they wouldn't use it. I know there is a pretty much limitless supply of labour in China, but unless I'm mistaken, the people who climb it wouldn't be willing to put themselves in personal jeopardy unless the wages were considerably higher than we know they are (translation: piss poor).
That doesn't mean, though, that the average building site worker gives more thought to the quality of the building than to getting the hell home as soon as he can. And they get pressure to complete in time and to the right spec, although they prioritise in that order. Get it done quick and 'good enough'. I'm not sure what the Chinese word for 'slap dash' is, but I'm fairly certain that in my lifetime it will become one of those imported words that we take for granted and believe to be part of our own language. Like pyjamas, verandah, tsunami, siesta and dickwad. And by slap dash, I mean really bad workmanship.
Anyone who has lived in Chinese-built accommodation for more than a week will be used to the quaint waterproofing regime and the way paint is applied without the need to pamper the surface first (ie by cleaning it and applying undercoat). So within a few months it all peels off and (a) looks like shit, and (b) needs doing again, including the need to repair the damage to surface itself. There is a new block just down the road from us which was completed less than a year ago. It has some outrageously bad-taste metal work all over the front in day-glo primary colours. Probably someone's idea of style. Anyway, the paint on the metal portal is already mostly peeled off, exposing the bare (no oxide undercoat here, then) metal to the wonderful Hong Kong weather. How much it will cost to repair and repaint that?
They are also just starting a new block right next to us. Lovely pile-driving, traffic controls and mud everywhere. Yesterday, in the longest spell of unbroken heavy rain Hong Kong has seen for more than a decade, I walked past the site. They'd been using a truck to pile drive on the edge of the site for the last couple of days, usefully reducing the road width to the size of a Harley Davidson without crash bars. Now the truck had gone, and two workers had obviously been told to repair the surface where the truck supports had bitten in. So in the middle of a massive rainstorm, they were mixing cement and laying it. Of course the rain was washing the cement out of the mix as it hit the floor, leaving a mass of loose ballast to enjoy a good cleansing wash from the rain. Doubtless that'll be having fun soon jumping up at the sides of the Merc 500 limos as they rush past to get to Market Opening on Monday. In some ways there is a delightful irony, since some of the people who live round here are fat cats who have made their pile by 'investing' in the property market. Nice that their drive for low-cost. high price developments is biting them back. Not that they care, of course. Just get the new model. I just hope that we don't end up with the side of the hill sliding away thanks to crap concreting. Better go and get my snorkel ready ......
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