Safety First

Last week I posted photos of the guy spidermanning the outside of a high rise apartment building installing an air conditioner. That is just the tip of the iceberg. There are lot of really good ways to hurt yourself in China. Uneven stairs, random holes, protruding metal... they are everywhere. On the one hand, it is refreshing to see a place that obviously hasn't succumbed to the American legal culture of litigation and paranoia. On the other hand, I'm not looking forward to the day that I forget to look for the sharp end of the parking shelter down by the shopping center that is exactly at the height of my forehead. When it happens, I'll try to have my camera on me, so I can give you a good posting about Chinese hospitals.

So here are three hypothetical scenarios for how you could really get hurt around here. OSHA was invented for a reason.


Let's say you are driving your car, which you are so proud of, down to Rainbow Walk to watch the fireworks on National Day. You feel very lucky to have found a parking space on the sidewalk. In your excitement, you jump out of the door without looking down. Hopefully you have a date with you, because otherwise it might be hours before anyone realizes that you are missing. (Low photo quality on this one, I only had my cell phone with me).

Let's suppose you are a city that is going places in the New China economy, and there is lots of construction that needs to get done quickly. Still, you can't afford to close all the roads, or commerce will be adversely affected. Solution? Just let the people and the machines live happily together.

So, you are a young communist-capitalist, out with your friends in your new Buick, which you have proudly decorated with pictures of Mickey Mouse. You are driving down the road, listening to decadent Western music, at a reasonable and prudent 150 km/hr. Just make sure you pay attention to any hazards near the road, or in it...

A note:

I'm sure that some people would look at that last photo and think it was photoshopped. It is very real. I took it about a quarter mile down the road from the previous picture. Obviously the locals know that it is a construction zone, because there is virtually no traffic midday on a Saturday. Still, there are no barriers, and no signs. The roadbed has been moved, but it seems that they have finished the road before going back to move the utility pole.

The picture invites a "man, those people are stupid" sort of ridicule that I want to distance myself from. If the hell-bent ambition for progress leads to weirdness like this, it is also what gave me a job here. I keep reading posts on news forums calling the Chinese "our enemies". Can't the regular people at least get paved roads and cholera-free tap water before they have to be the bad guys? This country is being very good to me, and that is why it is the only photograph that I have marked with a copyright note. I'm really hoping to never see it on another website used to the purpose of mocking the Chinese.