Bangkok – Chinese belt and road belt projects are examined in Thailand after 7.7 Myanmar earthquakes believed a 30 -storey building at 966 kilometers (600 miles) that Chinese engineers build in Bangkok.
The incomplete skyscraper was the only building to collapse in the slightly damaged Thai capital. But the catastrophe exposed allegedly of the steel reinforcement rods of lower quality which had broken, reducing the building to a huge pile of rubble which crushed around 87 construction workers, including 15 confirmed dead and 72 which have disappeared.
“I watched several clips in the building collapse from different angles,” said a Thai Prime Minister amazed Paetongtarn Shinawatra.
“According to my experience in the construction industry, I have never seen a problem like this.
“We must investigate in depth because a large part of the budget has been allocated, and the deadline for completion has been extended,” said Paetongtarn.
The investigation started with a bizarre and disturbing view. Two days after the earthquake on March 28, four Chinese men were filmed by seizing in their arms as many documents related to the construction they could transport and flee the rubble site.
Police arrested them, interviewed and released. The China Embassy in Bangkok and the powerful Ministry of the Interior of Thailand, who oversees the police, met to discuss the collapse of the skyscraper, but their talks were not made public.
The image of China is vital for the prestigious Beijing position among the Thai.
Washington and Beijing are officially in competition with each other for decades to influence diplomacy, politics, the economy and the Bangkok soldiers thanks to financial assistance, investment, tourism, education, ancestor ties and other ways.
In the debris of the collapsed skyscraper, the investigators extracted two different types of steel strengthening bars, also called reinforcement bars, which were supposed to provide support for the building when they were locked up in cement pillars.
After the earthquake, the Iron and Steel Institute of Thailand would have discovered the chemical composition, the mass and the resistance to the stress of the reinforcement bars would have failed its tests.
The photographs displayed by the Ministry of Industry and the Local Media showed a word released on a steel arrival bar widened.
This brand name would have been linked to a Chinese steel manufacturing company in Thailand, Bangkok Post reported on April 2.
The concerns about the role of China in the deadly collapse of the unfinished skyscraper are at a time when some Thai expressed anxiety about the growing scope of Beijing in the Kingdom.
The earthquake has also struck the economy in difficulty in Thailand, the sophisticated tourism industry, the condominium market and the construction of several billion dollars, insurance rates and other sectors.
This Southeast Asian nation is under an estimated loss of more than a billion dollars due to the earthquake, economists said.
At least 30 high -rise buildings in Bangkok were deemed uninhabitable due to the earthquake, announced on April 2 of the Public Works Department.
“We will focus on the communication of a single message, ensuring that Thailand is sure for travel,” said the Minister of Tourism and Sports, Sorawong Thienthong.
The government institutions of Thailand to inspect construction contracts, design plans and materials used in construction and its anti-corruption policies are criticized by public and Thai media to have or not to want to correct the defects of the skyscraper condemned before the earthquake.
Many Thai people noted, with dark irony, that the only building to collapse in Bangkok was the new headquarters of the State Audit Bureau (SAO). This government agency is responsible for preventing fudged contracts and questionable questionable projects.
“The Facebook page of the State Audit Bureau is no longer accessible on Wednesday, April 2, after being criticized and was accused of corruption linked to the collapsed building with more than 70 construction workers still not recorded,” said Khaosod English News.
The construction contract was a joint project between the Chinese government’s Group Engineering of the Chinese government n ° 10 and the Italian-Thaïlandian public development company based in Thailand (ITD).
Itd was founded in 1958 by an Italian and a Thai who met by recovering a ship stuck on the Chao Phraya river in Thailand.
Its website indicates that ITD is “the largest infrastructure construction company in Thailand and one of the largest in Southeast Asia.
“ITD has spread internationally to many regions, including India, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia, Maldives, Myanmar, Philippines, Madagascar, etc.,” he said.
Among its many projects in Thailand, the construction in 2006 of a passenger terminal at Bangkok Suvarnabhumi International Airport.
China Railway No. 10 Engineering Group is part of China Railway Engineering Corp (CREC), one of the largest engineering and construction companies in the world.
“All the agencies concerned have been responsible for diving more deeply to know how many other projects that the company has undertaken,” said Prime Minister Paetongtarn on April 1.
“All Bangkok buildings must comply with legal standards. Security must be absolute priority,” she said.
In Thailand, CREC and the railway n ° 10 lead the Belt and Road (BRI) initiative, China. The BRI is an international strategy of development and financial expansion stimulated by investments and loans from Beijing.
CREC’s projects for the BRI include the impressive the railways of Beijing-Shanghai and Qinghai-Tibet in China and, in East Africa, the Mombasa-Nairobi railway through Kenya.
CREC is a company belonging to the Communist Chinese government and has finished and worked on other projects in Thailand.
These include the laying of the 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 build one of the underground metropolitan lines in Bangkok and bid for others.
The Ministry of Commerce, the division of the repression of the economic crime of the Royal Thai police and the income department would then have opened surveys on a dozen other projects in Thailand would have been linked to CREC and China Railway n ° 10.
Before the earthquake, CREC proudly announced the Bangkok Sao skyscraper construction contract as the “first high-rise building for the office abroad”.
Philip J Cunningham, researcher of Asian policy in the media, said that the CREC website, after the earthquake, deleted photos, quotes and other pages related to the Sao building, including the previous announcement of CREC:
“In response to the national belt and road initiative, the 10th office of China Railway created a branch in Asia-Pacific, entering the Thai market as the first stage to fully open the Southeast Asian markets!
“The National Audit Office of Thailand… is the highest height and the largest construction project with a single building undertaken by the 10th office so far,” said a quote abolished according to Cunningham.
China Railway N ° 10 also built an 20 million dollars airport terminal behind Narathiwat in southern Thailand, local media reported.
In a hospital under construction for external patients and accidents in the southern city of Songkhla, the hospital director told journalists: “The quality of the building materials is under strict control and the building was designed to resist earthquakes.”
Investigators, on the other hand, check if other Chinese nationals have used false contracts to hide their collaboration with other Thai construction companies.
Richard S. Ehrlich is an American foreign correspondent based in Bangkok in Related by Asia since 1978 and winner of the Prix des correspondents foreign correspondents of Columbia University. Extracts from his two new non-fiction books, “Rituals. Killers. Wars. & Sex. – Tibet, India, Nepal, Laos, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka & New York “and” apocalyptic, smugglers and old “are available here.
Shawn W. Crispin contributed to the revision of this Bangkok report.
