“Taiwan Earthquake Investigators Arrest Developer of Collapsed Building”, 9 Feb 2016

The police have arrested the builder of a 17-story apartment complex that collapsed in a predawn earthquake…in southwestern Taiwan…Lin Minghui, the developer of the Wei-Guan Golden Dragon building, and two of his associates from the Wei-Guan Construction Company, the business that he used to build the apartment complex, were arrested…Tainan [municipal]’s…deputy secretaries general, said Mr. Lin and his associates had been arrested on suspicion of criminal business misconduct resulting in fatalities.

The arrest of Mr. Lin and his associates is likely to draw considerable attention in mainland China. Poor construction practices by government contractors were widely blamed for the collapse of many schools and the deaths of many children during the Sichuan Province earthquake that killed about 70,000 people and left nearly 18,000 missing in western China in 2008. When protests over the schools threatened to spread out of control, the Beijing authorities silenced the criticism and limited judicial actions against the contractors.

Mixing sarcasm with envy of Taiwan’s willingness to hold developers accountable for how their buildings fared in earthquakes, one person wrote on Tuesday night on Chinese social media, “If they did it this way on the mainland, would there be any developers left in China?”