|
||
| BEIJING -- About a mile from Tiananmen Square lies a pit from which a 28-story hotel will rise in a little more than a year. An army of construction workers lives and works at the open site, enduring plunging temperatures and freezing winds.
Some work the midnight hours, while the rest of the city sleeps. Others rise at dawn. They work 15-hour days or longer, seven days a week. When they topple onto their bunk beds, it is 12 to a room. There is no heat. One of them is Wei Zhongwen. He has more than two decades as a construction worker, and the injuries to prove it: a missing pinkie and a palm-size dent on his head under his neatly cropped hair. In the past decade, the 41-year-old has helped build skyscrapers, shopping malls and much else in Beijing and nearby provinces. He hasn't seen his wife or daughter in two years, and because of the press of work ahead of the Beijing Summer Olympics in 2008, he may not see them this year either. |
Migrant construction workers try to go home every year for Chinese New Year. But in the meantime, they use call centers like this one to contact their families. "For me, one of the biggest problems of this job is loneliness," says Mr. Wei, puffing on a cigarette. In his rural hometown, the money Mr. Wei has sent back has built his extended family a five-room house with a thatch roof, a 21-inch color television set and rooms housing a horse and some pigs. The hardship of his work is worth it, Mr. Wei says, to educate his daughter and sustain his family on their farm. Beijing is in the midst of an enormous building boom -- one of the most ambitious construction projects the world has ever seen. Cranes clutter its skyline. At more than 10,000 sites across the city, there is a total of 1.7 billion square feet of floor space under construction -- an area that, if laid out, would be nearly three times the size of Manhattan. |
|
| RETURN TO BIO | NEXT PAGE  |
|
