As a 7.7 magnitude earthquake struck Myanmar and Thailand last Friday, the temblor rattled buildings across the sprawling Thai capital of Bangkok, home to an incredible 142 skyscrapers. When the shaking ceased all were standing strong — with one very notable exception. The State Audit Office (SAO) building in Chatuchak district, a 30-story skyscraper still under construction by the subsidiary of a Chinese state-owned enterprise, collapsed into a heap of rubble, trapping nearly 100 people inside.
As of this week, 15 have been confirmed dead in the collapse, and a further 72 remain missing. Thailand announced over the weekend that it was launching an investigation to determine the cause of the collapse, and Bangkok’s prime minister said the tragedy had also damaged the country’s image.
As emergency teams sifted through the wreckage in the immediate aftermath, the building’s primary contractor, China Railway No. 10 Engineering Group, came under intense public anger and scrutiny. Anger was further fueled by clear efforts by the company, and by Chinese authorities, to sweep the project and the tragedy under the rug.
Shortly after the collapse, the China Railway No. 10 Engineering Group removed a post from its WeChat account that had celebrated the recent capping of the building, praising the project as the company’s first “super high-rise building overseas,” and “a calling card for CR No. 10’s development in Thailand.” Archived versions of this and other posts were shared by Thais on social media, including one academic who re-posted a deleted promo video to his Facebook account — noting with bitter irony that it boasted of the building’s tensile strength and earthquake resistance. Trying to access news of the building collapse inside China, Taiwan’s Central News Agency (CNA) noted that queries on domestic search engines returned only deleted articles from Shanghai-based outlets such as The Paper (澎湃新闻) and Guancha (观察网). In a post to Weibo, former Global Times editor Hu Xijin (胡锡进) tried to hedge the obvious, confessing that the building “probably had quality issues.” Even this post was rapidly deleted — making clear that the authorities were coming down hard on the story. Meanwhile, the machinery of propaganda continued to turn out feel-good news on China’s response to the quake, the Global Times reporting that emergency assistance for Myanmar embodied Xi Jinping’s foreign policy vision of a “community of shared future for mankind.”