BANGKOK – China’s Belt and Road Initiative projects are being scrutinized in Thailand after Myanmar’s 7.7 earthquake pancaked a 30-floor building 966 kilometers (600 miles) away that Chinese engineers were constructing in Bangkok.
The incomplete skyscraper was the only building to collapse in the lightly damaged Thai capital. But the disaster exposed allegedly substandard steel reinforcing rods that had snapped, reducing the building to a huge rubble pile that crushed about 87 construction workers, including 15 confirmed dead and 72 who disappeared.
“I watched multiple clips of the building collapse from different angles,” a stunned Thai Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra said.
“From my experience in the construction industry, I have never seen an issue like this.
“We must investigate thoroughly because a significant portion of the budget was allocated, and the deadline for completion had been extended,” Paetongtarn said.
The investigation began with a bizarre, troubling sight. Two days after the March 28 quake, four Chinese men were filmed grabbing in their arms as many construction-related documents as they could carry and running away from the rubble site.
Police detained, questioned and released them. China’s embassy in Bangkok and Thailand’s powerful interior ministry, which oversees the police, met to discuss the skyscraper’s collapse, but their talks were not made public.
China’s image is vital for Beijing’s prestigious standing among Thais.
Washington and Beijing have been unofficially competing with each other for decades to influence Bangkok’s diplomacy, politics, economy and military through financial aid, investment, tourism, education, ancestorial ties and other ways.
In the collapsed skyscraper’s debris, investigators extracted two different types of steel reinforcing bars, also known as rebars, which were supposed to provide support for the building while encased in cement pillars.
After the earthquake, the Iron and Steel Institute of Thailand reportedly discovered the chemical composition, mass, and stress strength of the rebars appeared to fail its tests.
Photographs displayed by the industry ministry and local media showed a word embossed on a steel rebar dug out of the wreckage.
That brand name was allegedly linked to a Chinese steel-making company in Thailand, the Bangkok Post reported April 2.
Concern about China’s role in the unfinished skyscraper’s deadly collapse comes at a time when some Thais have expressed anxiety about Beijing’s increasing reach into the kingdom.
The earthquake also hit Thailand’s troubled economy, sophisticated tourism industry, multi-billion-dollar high-rise condominium and construction market, insurance rates and other sectors.
This Southeast Asian nation faces an estimated loss of more than $1 billion because of the quake, economists said.
At least 30 high-rise buildings in Bangkok were deemed uninhabitable because of the earthquake, the Public Works Department said on April 2.
“We will focus on communicating a single message, ensuring that Thailand is safe for travel,” Tourism and Sports Minister Sorawong Thienthong said.
Thailand’s government institutions for inspecting building contracts, design plans and materials used in construction, and its anti-corruption policies, are being criticized by the public and Thai media for having been unable or unwilling to correct the doomed skyscraper’s flaws before the earthquake.
Many Thais noted, with grim irony, that the only building to collapse in Bangkok was the State Audit Office’s (SAO) new headquarters. That government agency is tasked with preventing fudged contracts and dodgy government-linked projects.
“The Facebook page of the State Audit Office is no longer accessible on Wednesday (April 2) after it came under heavy criticism and was accused of corruption related to the collapsed building with over 70 construction workers still unaccounted for,” reported Khaosod English news.
The construction contract was a joint project between the Chinese government’s China Railway No. 10 Engineering Group and the Thailand-based Italian-Thai Development (ITD) public company.
ITD was founded in 1958 by an Italian and a Thai who met while salvaging a ship stuck on Thailand’s Chao Phraya River.
Its website says ITD is “the largest infrastructure construction company in Thailand, and one of the largest in Southeast Asia.
“ITD has expanded internationally to numerous regions, including India, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia, Maldives, Myanmar, the Philippines, Madagascar etc,” it says.
Among its many projects in Thailand is the 2006 construction of a passenger terminal at Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi International Airport.
China Railway No. 10 Engineering Group, meanwhile, is part of China Railway Engineering Corp (CREC), one of the biggest engineering and construction firms in the world.
“All concerned agencies were instructed to delve deeper to find out how many other projects the company has undertaken,” Prime Minister Paetongtarn said April 1.
“All buildings in Bangkok must meet legal standards. Safety must be the top priority,” she said.
In Thailand, CREC and Railway No. 10 are driving China’s proudly showcased Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The BRI is an international development and financial expansion strategy boosted by Beijing’s investments and loans.
CREC’s projects for the BRI include China’s impressive Beijing-Shanghai and Qinghai-Tibet railways and, in East Africa, the Mombasa-Nairobi railway across Kenya.
CREC is an enterprise owned by the Communist Chinese government and has completed and worked on other projects in Thailand.
These include laying tracks on a link in what will eventually become a high-speed railway connecting Beijing and Singapore via Bangkok by train for the first time.
CREC helped construct one of Bangkok’s underground metro lines and was bidding for others.
The Commerce Ministry, Royal Thai Police Economic Crime Suppression Division and Revenue Department, meanwhile, reportedly opened investigations into a dozen other projects in Thailand allegedly linked to CREC and China Railway No. 10.
Before the quake, CREC proudly heralded the Bangkok SAO skyscraper construction contract as the “first high-rise building for the bureau overseas.”
Philip J Cunningham, a researcher of Asian politics in media, said CREC’s website, after the earthquake, deleted photos, quotes and other pages related to the SAO building, including CREC’s earlier announcement:
“In response to the national Initiative of the Belt and Road, China Railway 10th Bureau set up an Asia-Pacific branch, taking entry into the Thai market as the first step to fully open up new Southeast Asian markets!
“The National Audit Office of Thailand…is the highest height and largest single-building construction project undertaken by the 10th Bureau so far,” a deleted quote said according to Cunningham.
China Railway No. 10 was also constructing a behind-schedule $20 million airport terminal at Narathiwat in southernmost Thailand, local media reported.
At a hospital under construction for outpatients and accidents in the southern city of Songkhla, the hospital director told reporters, “The quality of construction materials is under strict control and the building was designed to withstand earthquakes.”
Investigators, meanwhile, are checking if any other Chinese nationals used fake contracts to hide their collaboration with other Thai construction firms.
Richard S. Ehrlich is a Bangkok-based American foreign correspondent reporting from Asia since 1978, and winner of Columbia University’s Foreign Correspondents’ Award. Excerpts from his two new nonfiction books, “Rituals. Killers. Wars. & Sex. — Tibet, India, Nepal, Laos, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka & New York” and “Apocalyptic Tribes, Smugglers & Freaks” are available here.
Shawn W. Crispin contributed editing to this report from Bangkok.
