My first evening back in the States last week I called my home in Suzhou to learn that water was coming up from the kitchen floor. “Are you sure it’s just not the sink leaking?” I asked, incredulous.
It seems it was indeed the floor leaking upward. A pipe laid in the concrete flooring of the 18th floor apartment had broken open. Workers on the scene said the quality of the piping and the workmanship in laying the plumbing was sub-par. The landlady hurried over to apologize vociferously. “When is William returning to Suzhou?” the worried landlady asked. “Next week Friday.”
“Good, everything should be fixed up by then,” she said wishfully. Everything, she did not seem to understand, included ripping up the tile flooring of the kitchen; pick axing the concrete covering the pipe; ripping up the wood-flooring in the adjacent living room (the water had seeped far and wide); and, of course, purchasing replacement items and laying it all down - supervised, of course - at a level of quality much higher than had gotten her into the sorry state in the first place.
Of course, by the time I’d returned to Suzhou, it hadn’t gotten done. Indeed, work had simply stopped a week after it had started. Best I can figure is the landlady understood clearly I was moving out of the property, wanted the last month’s rent and deposit returned and had no intention of paying any penalty for the breach of contract.
This incident puts me in mind of China’s own hurried infrastructure: both the hardware (roads, buildings, bridges and the rest), and the software - the attitude and level of pride with which Chinese construct their new society. Seems to me there is a distinct disconnect between the two, a dissonance: build it big, build it fast, ram it in before conditions change (economic, political), then deny responsibility, accountability when - not if, but when - things go bad.
When will Chinese government and society at large figure out that the approach to social plumbing they’ve used through a dozen dynastic cycles over thousands of years will of course spring a leak if laid without 21st century consideration?
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