When Hedy Lee moved to a posh serviced apartment in the capital's Beijing Yintai Centre, she expected to enjoy a life of luxury. After all, her neighbours included basketball player Yao Ming and Chinese actress Zhang Ziyi. Instead, she has found herself having to pamper to the building's problems.
Her bathroom drain sometimes stinks, the wooden floor cracks in the dry winters and one window never fails to let in the water on rainy days.
'Every time something happens, I have to call the plumbers and foreman to fix it,' said the 46-year-old English teacher.
Lee has moved six times in eight years. The John Portman-designed complex follows stints in four villas and another high-class flat - all of them had problems stemming from poor-quality construction and maintenance.
Rapid urbanisation on the mainland has seen the rise of blocks of flats, shopping malls and office complexes. But the building industry suffers from a shortage of skilled workers. Often plumbers, electricians and bricklayers receive little if any formal training, are poorly paid and aren't encouraged to take pride in their work. What's more, a transitory labour force weakens supervision and makes it difficult to enforce accountability on workers.
According to data compiled by the Economist Intelligence Unit, a sister company of The Economist magazine, 1.8 billion square metres of residential floor space was built in China last year. That is the equivalent of nearly every home in Spain. Put another way, 'at China's current rates of construction, it would take roughly two weeks' to build the city of Rome, the EIU said.
'I can't say none of the huge number of construction [projects] is of good quality,' said Chen Zhaoyuan, a professor at Tsinghua University's civil engineering department in Beijing. 'But, generally speaking, China must be at the tail-end worldwide' when it comes to building standards.