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The Chinese prime minister wants to renovate 3 million old buildings across the country, but still wants politics at the summit.
By Keith Bradsher
GUANGZHOU, China – When China faced past economic recessions, it favored billion-dollar pharaonic structure projects to temporarily inject cash into the economy A network of high-speed trains that now connects 700 cities, state-of-the-art highways longer than U. S. interstates and 81 of the world’s 100 highest bridges.
Now, a senior Chinese official has a new concept for reviving the expansion of the coronavirus pandemic: elevators.
Chinese Prime Minister Li Keqiang and his government allies need to renovate up to 3 million older apartment buildings, projects that charge less than $100,000.
Low ambitions reflect China’s evolution from a young but poor country to an aging middle class.
While China still likes large infrastructure projects, they no longer have the same economic effect. High-speed rail lines and roads already unraat all major cities, so the new ones unraat ever smaller communities in China’s mountainous interior, at an exorbitant cost. The country’s debt is so high that it has a serious drag on growth.
Although elevators have a smaller economic impact, they provide social benefits to an aging population. A richer Chinese society also demands more from its leaders.
Kong Ting endured nine months of pregnancy in an elevator-free component on the tenth floor of Guangzhou, the semitropical center of southeastern China. Several times a day, he went up and down the 162 steps of the building. “The hardest component,” he said.
Every day, she was on the terrace on the third floor of construction and complained to the neighbors, many of whom were older. Last year, the maximum number of construction apartment owners earned $4,300 each, won a giant municipal grant and added a small elevator to the construction aspect.
China’s buildings want improvement.
As China’s economy began to open after Mao’s death in 1976, young migrants left farms en masse to move to newly built factories that were appearing everywhere. Over the next 25 years, Chinese cities grew through almost as many other people as the entire American population. .
To space out the city’s new residents, municipal governments and state-owned enterprises have built seven- to ten-story luxury apartment towers across the country. The imposition of Soviet-style complexes temporarily ruled the landscape, especially in production centers such as Guangzhou.
Almost none of them had elevators. China remains a deficient country, it had few factories to make elevators. Imports were expensive.
The lack of elevators is now a major challenge in an ageing society.
During the 1960s, Mao encouraged families to have many children. The motto says “the more people there are, the more powerful we are.
Starting this year, young children born in the 1960s are 60 years old, the age at which many Chinese retire. They have few young people or grandchildren to help them, since China began implementing its strict “one-child” policy in the 1970s.
“If we don’t prepare in advance, we may have a bigger challenge than expected,” because the number of other seniors in China is increasing dramatically,” said Lu Jiehua, a professor of demographic studies at Peking University.
Without elevators, many long-term tenants get trapped in their homes, rely on food deliveries and can’t meet with their friends or walk.
Jiang Weixing, a white-haired woman in her 90s, sitting in the sun in an outdoor wheelchair at a Guangzhou clinic on a recent afternoon, briefly waited with two younger members of the family circle for a special wheelchair accessible taxi that took her home after medical treatment.
Until an elevator was recently added to her high-rise building, Ms. Jiang almost never left her apartment. To do this, it takes two or three more people to climb it up many stairs.
Elevators, or lack there are, have some other cause of emerging economic inequality in China.
Guangzhou, a rather prosperous and socially progressive city, can subsidize projects and has already added some 6,000 elevators to older buildings, almost as much as the rest of China combined. elevator facilities, offering a $93,000 grant for apartment buildings within city limits.
Many less affluent cities do not have elevator installers or small programs. At the southern tip of China, Zhanjiang grants a meame subsidy of $3,000 for construction.
Projects are also not universally appreciated, especially through the citizens of the lower floors. Elevators block one or more of their windows and don’t get them many advantages.
Chen Xin, 52, owner of an apartment on the ground floor in Guangzhou, first resisted an elevator assignment in its construction that meant tearing down its front door, forcing it to enter and pass through a side door facing a courtyard. Chen agreed after repeat offenders on the upper floors paid him $3,500.
To avoid disputes and lawsuits, Guangzhou imposed regulations on assignments. If the owners of two-thirds of the assemblies in an apartment building and two-thirds of the construction square footage vote in favor of the elevator, the assignment will have to be installed.
Guangzhou’s technique is spreading. Hefei, a city of 8 million people in central China, announced on September 1 that it would adopt a similar rule.
From an economic point of view, a national elevator policy, which Prime Minister Li proposed in his annual confrontation with the country’s legislature in May, can mitigate the economic effects of the pandemic on Chinese manual workers.
Building concrete or glass and metal lifting towers on the sides of apartment buildings is labor intensive and may only provide employment for some of the tens of millions of Chinese migrant workers who are still unemployed.
But supporters of the plan would possibly lack the political strength to do so in fact nationally.
Building elevator shafts on the sides of buildings is a task governed by small personal contractors in China, who then purchase elevators from a multinational company (Otis Elevator, Schindler, Kone, Mitsubishi Electric or Hitachi) or one of several small Chinese manufacturers, such as IFE Elevators in Guangzhou.
While China’s most sensible leader, Xi Jinping, has called for greater reliance on the national call to bring expansion to life and called separately to combat poverty and housing for the elderly, he has not supported in particular a national elevator program.
Its main districts (the army, security agencies, and gigantic public enterprises) have little to gain from elevator projects, as they focused on building railway lines and roads that allow China to send troops to remote hotspots, such as the Indian border.
Housing experts in China insist that the country will solve its shortage of elevators. “Everyone invests in combination and then solves the problem,” said Huo Jinhai, senior engineer at the Ministry of Housing and Construction.
And the plan has support: the Ministry of Finance.
That’s weird. The branch has maintained central government spending with very strict control even when local and provincial governments have become deeply indebted.
One of the ministry’s most prominent budget hawks is Jia Kang, its long-time director of studies. When, however, he retired, the ministry established an influential advisory organization close to him, the Chinese Academy of New Economics on the supply side.
In his new role, Jia has become a staunch advocate of spending cash on elevators, and was born from a non-public experience.
Mr. Jia, 66, and his wife, Jiang Xiaoling, 63, bought a small ground floor apartment years ago and then, as their savings increased, they bought a larger apartment on the nearby third floor. the two apartments several times a day and need you to install an elevator so you don’t have to climb the stairs.
“In years, ” he said, “my wife complains often: “Why do we tolerate these conditions?”
Coral Yang contributed to the research.
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