Fake Steel So Weak It Breaks by Hand Tofu Dreg Buildings Put Millions at Risk

It's all covered in today's China Truths. Guys, please give me some advice. I'm really out of options. I haven't even spent a single day in this new house I just bought, and now what am I supposed to do? Forget the crying. Crying won't help. You still have to repay the loan no matter what. At this point, no advice will work. If you want to fix it, you'll have to tear it down and rebuild it from scratch. China's tofu-dreg construction projects have long been heavily criticized. Online, videos of poorly built houses and bridges constantly surface. But what's even more shocking is that even the most basic components at construction sites, like bolts, welds, and rebar, can be faked. Let's take a look. I really couldn't believe it. A man was doing maintenance work on a signal tower several dozen meters high. While checking, he casually touched a bolt, and it snapped clean off. At first I thought it was just a coincidence, but then every bolt he touched broke just the same. Good heavens, is this because the bolts are counterfeit or due to long-term corrosion? Look at this stainless steel bolt. Something this small can even be fake. See these bolts down here? These are the real ones, completely different. Time has proven the difference. This bolt looked like stainless steel at first, but turns out it was a fake. Building a house is a major undertaking, and yet even something as fundamental and crucial as welding can be faked. In recent years, buying a home in China has become incredibly difficult. Many people know this firsthand. But even after pouring your entire family's life savings into a home and finally moving in, there's no guarantee an accident won't happen someday. Every minute and second I spend here is torment. I feel like the house could collapse in the next moment. The entire building's safety is at risk. I've spent my whole life working hard, and now all the money has gone into this house. This windowsill was filled and finished with tons and tons of foam. Look, this kind of foam just falls apart with a slight poke. No strength, no hardness. It's turned to powder. And after it crumbles, it looks like this. This cement sand layer here, just rub it lightly with your hand and it falls right off. Look, just a light rub and it crumbles instantly. Ceilings in apartment buildings across mainland China are truly fragile, and there's real-life proof of that. A man once accidentally stepped through a ceiling, creating a horrifying scene. And this isn't an isolated case. In the Yuechuan North Resettlement Housing Project in Sanya, Hainan, China, an upper floor ceiling was found to have no rebar at all, an absolute textbook case of a tofu-dreg project. I believe if you break this open, it'll be just the same. This is no lie. If you dig here, it'll be the same situation. As long as you guys can take care of it, that's all that matters. Bamboo and steel are two materials that are fundamentally unrelated. Yet in the communist country of China, they seem to have a rather close relationship. Look at this bridge. My god, are they really using bamboo instead of steel? A slab this large has only one or two pieces of rebar, and even those are just loosely suspended bars. Here is a concrete column from a residential building somewhere in China, but what's exposed inside isn't steel, it's bamboo. So what's the quality of rebar in China like? The truth might scare you. On June 26, 2025, according to a report by mainland media outlet Langchao News, at the large-scale residential project Guoyun City Phase 2 in Bezhouhebei province, several 16mm diameter rebar rods were reportedly snapped barehanded by workers. Try another one, look at that, shattered into pieces. Mr. Ji, the project foreman, discovered that a batch of 16mm rebar was so brittle it could be an abnormal condition, as such steel should be hard even to bend. He reported it to the Guoyun City Phase 2 contractor, China Metallurgical Tiangong Construction, but was shown a report claiming the rebar met standards. When he escalated the issue to Bezhouhebei's housing bureau, officials said all materials passed inspection. Later, they claimed two rounds of testing confirmed compliance with design requirements. Mr. Ji was eventually dismissed for speaking out. Netizens reacted, start by investigating those who called it up to standard. Some noted the contrast between honest workers and corrupt officials. Snapping steel by hand and replacing iron with bamboo may sound absurd, but such cases are real. In fact, some collapsed bridges were found with no rebar at all. On August 8, 2024, the Longding-Xuyan Bridge in Guizhou suddenly collapsed. No rebar was visible at the fracture point. In another part of China, the exit of a highway tunnel collapsed. Fortunately, it was discovered in time and no serious casualties occurred. Netizens commented, the CCP's construction projects are the very definition of tofu-dreg engineering. Look at the highway foundation. Can anyone spot a single steel bar in those videos? These are projects costing a billion yuan per kilometer. Why do so many directors of transport bureaus and highway departments end up in prison? As long as the CCP's dictatorship survives, the Chinese people will never be truly safe. Due to continuous heavy rainfall, on June 3, 2025, a section of road in Sanjiangdong Autonomous County, Luzhou City, Guangxi Province suddenly collapsed. Several cars parked along the road fell into a On June 24 in Guizhou Province, a viaduct on the Xiaorong Expressway between Sandu County and Rongjiang County suddenly collapsed. Several vehicles plunged into the valley below. A red semi-truck was left dangling in midair, its driver trapped, waiting for rescue. A bystander tried to stop other drivers from moving forward. It is reported that the trapped driver was eventually rescued safely. Some netizens sighed. Just saw a video my colleague sent. On their way home from Yulin, Guangxi, their route was completely cut off. Covid, typhoons, floods, earthquakes, natural disasters non-stop. In these turbulent times, we've finally realized what truly matters most. Treasure every step you take. Why are there so many tofu-dreg construction projects in China? The answer still lies in the political system of the Chinese Communist Party, CCP. Zhang Zhenglin, a construction worker from Yunnan Province, personally witnessed severe material skimming and illegal design alterations during the construction of a high-speed railway tunnel in Keqing City, Yunnan. He shared with an overseas Chinese-language media outlet, When building a tunnel, you first have to excavate the cavity, then pour concrete and install rebar. But during the construction process, the amount of rebar and concrete was significantly reduced. Based on my rough estimate, for a 1,400-meter tunnel, 2,800 meters total for both directions, the value of the materials cut was over 20 million yuan. He also revealed that during the concrete pouring of the base arch, there was serious underfilling. The base was padded with dirt and construction waste. The concrete layer, which was supposed to be 150 meters thick, ended up being less than 50 centimeters. Each month, Zhang's boss even told him to use the excavator to steal rebar from the site and load it onto large trucks. His own father asked him to help with the theft twice a month, five to six trucks each time, with each truck carrying more than 40 tons. He added, To win bids, companies often submit offers below actual construction costs. So after winning, how do they recoup the money and still turn a profit? The answer is, cut corners. Reduce or completely skip materials like rebar and concrete. It's a widely accepted, unspoken rule in the industry. Zhang Zhenglin concluded, The shady side of China's construction industry is just the tip of the iceberg under CCP rule. It's the system that breeds all of this. Chinese officials are appointed from above, and their top priority is always to report upward, not to be accountable to the people or to the actual work itself. And this only perpetuates a vicious cycle. Chinese investors are fleeing to Japan as real estate collapse accelerates. Market consulting firms report that with investment returns in China plunging, global investors, especially those from Hong Kong, are rapidly pulling capital out of China and pouring it into Japan's booming residential real estate market. According to the South China Morning Post on June 22, data from global real estate management giant Colliers International revealed that in Q1 this year alone, Chinese investors poured $1 billion USD, about 7.19 billion yuan, into Japan's residential sector, more than double the five-year average of $428 million. Masahiro Tanikawa, head of investment services at Colliers Japan, didn't mince words. As China's real estate market teeters on the edge of collapse, Hong Kong investors, once fixated on China, are now rushing to safer havens like Japan and Australia. The SCMP report noted that since 2020, China's property debt crisis has spiraled, and over the past 24 months, new home prices have kept plunging without pause, driving investors to flee. Mindworks Properties, a branch of Hong Kong's Mindworks Capital, recently acquired Haven Shibora, a high-end multifamily apartment in Tokyo's Minato Ward, marking a clear pivot to Japan. As China's property sector crumbles, more and more wealthy Chinese are not just moving their money, but moving their lives. By the end of 2023, Chinese residents in Japan hit 822,000, up 60,000 from the previous year, the biggest jump in recent years.