‘Tofu-dregs building’: Was shoddy Chinese construction to blame for Bangkok collapse?

As investigators probe the deadly collapse of the under-construction State Audit Office’s headquarters in the March 28 earthquake, Bangkokians have given the project a new nickname: “Tofu-dregs building”.

The investigation is focusing on Chinese construction materials, as well as revisions made to the design, as they seek reasons for the 30-storey structure’s collapse.

Construction irregularities are believed to be the cause of the tragedy.

The Chatuchak district high-rise was the only large building in Thailand to collapse when seismic tremors from a 7.7-magnitude quake in Myanmar’s Sagaing region rippled through the Thai capital, 1,000 kilometres from the epicentre.

‘Pancake’ collapse

Experts described the structure’s destruction as a “pancake collapse”, with floors crumbling vertically on top of the other in a stack of debris.

More than 100 people – mostly construction workers – were trapped in or around the building as it fell.

As of April 22, search teams had recovered 53 bodies and nine survivors from the mountain of rubble. Another 41 are still missing.

The State Audit Office awarded the 2.13-billion-baht project for its headquarters to ITD-CREC in 2020 – a joint venture between Italian-Thai Development Plc and China Railway Number 10 Ltd. China Railway Number 10’s parent company is China Railway Engineering Corporation (CREC), a major Chinese state-owned conglomerate headquartered in Beijing.

The 130-year-old CREC is one of the world’s largest construction and engineering firms, ranked 35th on the 2021 Fortune Global 500 list by revenue.

CREC projects extend beyond construction to industrial equipment manufacturing, scientific research and consulting, real estate, and resource development, according to Fortune.

Tofu-dregs project?

The building’s collapse drew comparisons with “tofu-dreg projects” in China – a term for substandard construction linked to corruption and regulatory failures.

Wang Kuo-Chen, an assistant research fellow at Taiwan’s Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research, pointed to the dramatic way it toppled as a telltale signature of a “tofu-dregs project”.

“The building was pulverised instead of tilting to one side. This is a classic sign of substandard construction and cost-cutting,” he told Radio Free Asia in early April, noting that no other building in Bangkok had collapsed in the quake.

China expert and commentator David Zhang agreed with Wang’s analysis.

“It just crumbled, there’s really no structure to speak of. Not even any physical resistance seems to have been added to the material there,” he told the online magazine Newsflare.

Source of the term

The term “tofu-dregs project” was coined in 1998 by then-Chinese prime minister Zhu Rongji while he was inspecting levees that had breached, causing severe flooding along the Yangtze River.

He angrily described the collapsed floodwalls as “tofu dregs” – comparing the shoddy workmanship to discarded leftovers from soybean curds.

Three decades on, the terms “tofu-dreg project”, “tofu-dregs” or even “tofu building” have been widely adopted by Chinese media to describe substandard construction projects linked to corruption and other irregularities.

Tofu-dreg projects and their tragic consequences made headlines after the 2008 Sichuan earthquake in China.

The 7.9-magnitude tremor killed over 87,000 people, including around 20,000 children who died in collapsed school buildings later found to be substandard.

As bereaved parents sought answers for their tragic loss, allegations of corruption in the doomed school buildings’ construction cast a spotlight on the problem of tofu-dreg projects in China.

However, Chinese authorities censored news of the school collapses, with parents, protesters and journalists reportedly intimidated or arrested for demanding accountability.

Riot police were also deployed to break up protests by angry parents who lost their children, the New York Times reported in July 2008.

Beijing censorship

Beijing is also reportedly censoring reports of the Bangkok collapse, amid mounting scrutiny of the Chinese constructor in Thailand.

Searches for keywords like “Bangkok” and “tower” on Chinese social media returned limited results, Australia’s ABC News said. Reports on the collapsed building on the Chinese state media outlet Xinhua’s website have also vanished.

The news was likely being censored in China to limit discussions that might be “embarrassing” for the state-owned company, said Lynette Ong, a professor of Chinese politics at the University of Toronto, in an interview with ABC News.

“This Chinese-built structure was the only one to collapse in a neighbourhood of tall buildings,” she noted.