Doubts raised over quality of housing projects

China Daily, April 25, 2011

By Saturday, crews had made repairs to substandard walls in 293 of the project's houses. The renovation work will be finished in the next few days, the developer told Xinhua.

In recent years, China has moved faster to build housing projects for poor residents.

In 2010, the country began putting up 5.9 million subsidized apartments for low-income residents and shantytown dwellers, building 100,000 more houses than it had first planned.

And the construction of a further 10 million apartments will begin this year, according to official figures.

With the progress have come concerns from the public about the projects' construction quality and about the living conditions inside them. Those have been bolstered by media reports saying that some houses have been shoddily constructed or built in remote places.

In December 2010, a 107,000-square-meter subsidized housing project in Wuhan, capital of Central China's Hubei province, was found to have been built on land polluted by a chemical plant that had once occupied the site.

In October, a building project, named Sunny Paradise, in Beijing, became the first government-subsidized apartments in the city to be demolished because they were built with substandard concrete.

The Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development has encouraged its branches at all levels to strengthen their supervision of construction quality and to pay special attention to public housing this year.

The ministry will begin a two-month special examination of the quality of buildings in August, concentrating on projects built using local government subsidies, according to an announcement on its website.