Venezuelans weren’t killed by the earthquake. It was Chinese ‘tofu-dreg’ construction

Monday-Tuesday blog

Here’s a story which seems to have disappeared from our mainstream media: ‘The UK government officially approved the new Chinese mega-embassy in central London. Housing Secretary Steve Reed granted planning permission on January 20, 2026, allowing Beijing to transform the former Royal Mint site near the Tower of London into the largest diplomatic mission of its kind in Europe.’

Lets’s take a very brief step back. On 28 March 2025, there was a 7.8 magnitude earthquake in Myanmar. In the Thai capital, Bangkok, about 1,000 km away there was minor structural damage to a few buildings. But there was one exception. The new offices for the Thai government Audit Office being built by a Chinese construction company collapsed killing at least 76 workers. Though there are often so many undocumented workers on such projects that the real number was probably higher:

After the collapse, Chinese engineers were stopped by the Thai police as they tried to carry away a large quantity of documents. Subsequent investigations found things like substandard concrete, key structural beams/pillars which hadn’t been installed and substandard steel from a Thailand-based steelworks owned by a Chinese company.

That brings us to something called “Chinese tofu-dreg construction”. Professor Google tells us:

“Tofu-dreg” construction (豆腐渣工程) is a Chinese slang term for buildings and infrastructure that look sturdy but crumble easily due to shoddy materials, corruption, and rushed work. Coined in 1998, these projects often feature fatal flaws like missing steel rebar, structural foam in concrete, and poor oversight.

Below is a link to a China Observer report on the recent Venezuela earthquake. We have to be careful with China Observer reports as they aren’t too complimentary about the glorious Chinese Communist Party. However, although these reports show (IMHO) an obvious anti-communist political bias, they tend to be well-founded in the truth.

The China Observer report suggests that many of the thousands killed in the recent Venezuela earthquake died because they lived or worked in tofu-dreg buildings constructed by Chinese companies. There’s even a scene quite early on in the China Observer report which shows a rescue worker horrified to find what should have been a solid concrete beam or pillar was actually just a shell of concrete suffed with styrofoam. For readers who, like myself, don’t have an engineering background, styrofoam is great for packing fragile items you want to send through the post or by a courier company but is not generally a recommended construction material for high-rise buildings. And, of course, if a concrete pillar or beam is hollow or else stuffed with styrofoam or some other rubbish, it won’t have the necessary ‘rebars’ – reinforcing steel bars.

As the British mainstream media could seem to have adopted a ‘don’t-upset-the-Chinese’ policy, I rather doubt whether any of our ‘intrepid’ investigative journalists will be covering this deadly scandal. I wrote this blog early on Sunday morning. In the Sunday Times I bought later that day, there was a long report about the bungling, incompetence and corruption of the Venezuelan authorities. The Sunday Times even tried to blame the Trump administration for the high death toll. But while the Sunday Times report did say that many of the collapsed buildings were built by Chinese, Russian and Belarus companies, the Sunday Times made no mention of the fact that the standard of construction might not have been totally world class.

Here’s the China Observer report. You only need to watch a few minutes to get the gist of the story: