![Sample our Engineering & Technology journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5933/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Engineering-Tech.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
The number of China-aided stadium projects has greatly increased since 2000, along with new working models and architectural characteristics. As government-financed construction projects, these stadiums could not escape the influence of the Chinese government. This study aims to explore such influence on the design and management processes of China-aided stadium projects after 2000 and identify their variations and characteristics through an interview-based study using statistical and qualitative text analysis methods. The results show that the governmental influence exists, and various processes received different degrees of influences from the Chinese government, among which the pre-design, design and tender and bid processes receive more. Such influences are generated through various approaches including the official setup of the pre-design process, the requirement to use Chinese building codes (standard), the strict control of investment costs, the compulsory guiding principles for design, and the opacity of the bid evaluation, etc. This research represents new knowledge to link the political aspects with the architectural outcomes, generates references for future oversea projects and concludes to better understand the implementation model of the China-aided construction system.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Correction Statement
This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1 This number was estimated by the authors through the number of aid projects announced by the Chinese government and the real cases the authors have collected from related website and institutes.
2 This term was used officially to describe the model in which China completed all the design, management and construction parts then handed the project over to the recipient country.
3 Why this research takes stadiums as the examples will be explained in the following paragraphs.
4 After the economic reform, most Chinese domestic construction projects began to enter the market and experiment with the tender and bid model due to China’s market-opening to the world.
5 20 institutions were listed as ones that were qualified to design and manage China-aided civil construction and industrial aided construction projects, which have been the main participants in the design and management of China-aided construction projects over the past 60 years.
6 In 2018, this department has been regrouped as the China International Development Cooperation Agency.
7 This list was announced in the official website of MOFCOM. http://yws.mofcom.gov.cn/article/o/i/201601/20160101234363.shtml.
8 DAC (Development Assistance Committee) is one of the most dominant aid organizations worldwide, which is from OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development), consists of 30 members including U.S., U.K., Japan, Korean and some European countries, and mainly provide Official Development Assistance (ODA). Countries outside DAC but also provide ODA to other areas are referred to as non-DAC countries, such as China and India.
9 The number was calculated by the authors.
10 Other constructions include schools, hospitals, housing projects, office buildings and cultural buildings, etc.
11 For example, in 22 July, Chinese president Jinping Xi attended the project-hand-over ceremony of China-aid Wrestling Stadium in Senegal during his state visits to Africa, which was reported by various domestic and worldwide media.
12 This list was explained in the introduction part of this article.
13 In total, we collected over 150,000 words of interview contents.
14 When calculating the percentages, we took ‘no answer’ into account in case that some participants would not like to give answers for undiscovered reasons.
15 In the qualitative text analysis, texts from 22 participants’ interview contents were related with our research. There were 121 text passages being coded and analysed in total.
16 In our research, we set the ‘moderate-low influence’ variation because the expression of the conviction in the interview text was mostly between moderate degree and low degree. We group them as one comparison of ‘high influence’ and ‘no influence’, in order to illustrate the research clearer.