Watch: Sixty-eight workers demolish a flyover in China overnight (and other infrastructure quickies)
A hotel was built in six days. And a 57-storey skyscraper in 19 days.
While products made in China might have a bad rap, the infrastructure is universally admired for being robust and quick.
Every few years, a new video comes out depicting some extraordinary engineering feat that companies and workers in China have accomplished. The latest such accomplishment involved a 500-metre flyover in the city of Nanchang in southern China being demolished overnight by 68 diggers. The 24-year-old bridge was destroyed to make way for a metro line in the city.
And so, this...
...became this.
The Chinese are good not only at demolishing bridges but also at making them. In 2015, Beijing's Sanyuan Bridge was retrofitted in 43 hours.
In 2010, a 15-storey hotel in the city of Changsha was built in six days.
And in March 2015, 19 days was all it took for a Chinese construction company to make this 57-storey building.
While remarkable, this speedy duration only covers the final step in the construction process. The actual parts required in this process are pre-fabricated in factories and brought together.
An article in Treehugger, while saying that China has superior quality machinery, also explains the advantages the country begins with.
They have a couple of advantages to start with; they don't have to negotiate for land because the State owns it all. They don't have to have those pesky public reviews or do environmental impact statements. They just decide where they want to put a train or a road and do it.