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 a 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 the prime minister said the tragedy had seriously 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) reported 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) confessed 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.
Searches on Weibo today for “Bangkok” and “tofu-dreg projects” (豆腐渣工程), a term often used in Chinese to describe shoddy and dangerous construction, return almost entirely results prior to March 18, ten days before the collapse in Bangkok. One rare post from March 28, however, shares the screenshot of a social media post that day by Beijing Youth Daily (北京青年報), an outlet under the capital’s local chapter of the Communist Youth League, that apparently included street-view video of building collapse in Bangkok. A hashtag on the post reads: “#A building under construction in Bangkok collapses during earthquake#” (曼谷一在建高樓地震中坍塌).
The still image appears to capture an early moment in the building’s collapse, which was recorded at the same moment from another angle by a dashcam — footage shared in a report by the BBC. The Weibo user reposting the image from the Beijing Youth Daily account takes care not to directly mention the Chinese construction company, commenting only: “The earthquake was strong, but this was clearly a ‘tofu-dreg project,’ no? The relevant construction parties should be held to account!”
Several news outlets in the region have also reported, citing the commissioner of Bangkok’s Metropolitan Police Bureau, that an investigation has been launched into the alleged removal of 37 files from the building site, now a restricted zone, by four Chinese nationals. Bernama, Malaysia’s national news agency, reported Monday that one Chinese national, identifying himself as project director at the site, had been apprehended.
Meanwhile, the machinery of propaganda continued to turn out feel-good news on China’s response to the quake. The Global Times reported that emergency assistance for Myanmar embodied Xi Jinping’s foreign policy vision of a “community of shared future for mankind.” In Hong Kong, the Ta Kung Pao (大公報) newspaper, run by the Liaison Office of China’s central government, twisted the knife into the United States as it reported on the earthquake response, noting the absence of USAID, recently dismantled by the Trump administration. Behind the news, the paper declared, “China’s selfless response demonstrates the responsibility of a great power.”
