About three decades ago, most of China’s cities were horizontal and the vast majority of China’s population lived in rural areas.
Today, more than 500 million live in China’s modern, vertical cities. Even in 1999, the first time I visited Shanghai, much of the city was horizontal. Today, Shanghai has over 4,000 high-rises with more being built all the time.
This is how China is providing homes for its huge population.
What caused me to think about this was a piece from Reuters about a recent 28-story high-rise fire in an apartment block in Shanghai that killed 42. Fifty more were taken to a nearby hospital. Even the hospitals in Shanghai are vertical.
Since China has only been going vertical for the last three decades, this is a new type of tragedy for China.
Reading about the fire brought back memories of The Towering Inferno, a film from 1974 starring Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, William Holden and a host of other well-known actors of the time.
According to the National Fire Protection Association in the United States, between 1985 and 2002, 1,600 civilians died and over 20,000 were injured in about 385,000 high-rise building fires in the United States, excluding the MGM Grand Hotel and the Las Vegas Hilton fires in the early 80’s, and the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.
The high-rise fire at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas claimed 87 lives.
With China building so many high rises there will be more fires, and fatalities may even match or exceed America’s history of high-rise fires.
What I find interesting is this—with thousands of high-rise fires in the US annually, why haven’t we heard about them? Yet, when one fire hits a high rise in Shanghai, news of it spreads across the global immediately.
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
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