I visited China in 2001, the guest of a business acquaintance. He took me to a factory he owned; it occupied one floor of a building that had been erected during the Mao era.
No elevators. We started climbing stairs to get to the third floor, and I almost immediately tripped and fell. Puzzled, I looked closely at the stairway. Every step was a different height! Some were ~2 inches, some were ~3 inches, a couple were ~4 inches!
I asked him how this came to be. He told me that the building was built by “Peoples Construction Crews” or something like that. Mao believed that college-educated architects were counterrevolutionary, and so tens of thousands of buildings of that era were designed by “The People.” The stairway was one result.
I have to say the building seemed to me to be basically sound; perhaps a little old-fashioned in its over-solidity. I didn’t observe any other deficiencies.
Maybe just the stairways were made by The People.
Did you see that video a few months ago or more about a Chines building collapsing? There are many substandard buildings in China. They weren’t all built by Peoples Construction Crews, but many had been build by people who had grown up listening to commie ideology. I remember seeing a video in a college geography class in the early nineties concerning Russian i.e. Soviet workers. It was made before the fall of the Soviet Union. My prof’s area of expertise was Russia and the satellite countries. The video followed one Russian guy who worked in construction, and it showed some of the stuff he was proud of making. Looked like something a crew of drunken bums made. Maybe they were drunk.