How China Builds So Fast

Last month China made headlines around the world for announcing it had built a fully functioning 1,500 room hospital in just five days. This remarkable feat of engineering and logistics was executed in response to a Covid-19 surge in Nangong, a city in Hebei province. It recalled a time earlier in the pandemic, when workers in Wuhan erected a 1,000-bed hospital in a little over a week. Right now, even in the teeth of Coronavirus, China’s energetic builders are not only creating hospitals at breakneck pace, but moving startlingly quickly in the spheres of high speed rail, bridge-building and skyscraper construction. So today we’re putting on our hard hats and asking exactly how does China build so fast? China’s modern economic boom is little short of dazzling. Ballooning national prosperity has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, urbanised its citizenry faster than any other civilisation in human history, and created some pretty awesome infrastructure projects along the way. Not least the w