Kitty in China: More Earthquakes and Chinese Buildings

Since the first major earthquake a couple weeks ago, there have been various aftershocks occurring, and even more common is the constant threat of aftershocks. At least once a day, I get a text message (from who, I'm not exactly sure) notifying me about the current state of the seismic plates and whether or not I should be concerned. Last week, the entire country was warned there would be another earthquake between the hours of 10pm and midnight, and everyone was thus advised to go outside their homes and any other building they might be occupying. This whipped up enough paranoia so that the entire student body (or it seemed) moved outside to camp in the streets or other open areas. Here is a picture of the badminton courts that night, just outside the hotel .

I chose not to spend the night outside because a) I'm pretty sure you can't predict when an earthquake will happen and b) the first one didn't do any harm in Xi'an, so an aftershock is even less of a threat. Altogether it wasn't worth the trouble of sleeping outside when I had to look chipper in front of 30 students the next day.
However, some students are rightfully worried about staying in their dormitories. I was told by Ma Jing that one dormitory on campus had even moved -a whole inch!- and the students of that building are staging a "sleep-out" protest as I write this. I'm not entirely sure that's ture, but, there has been a lot of controversy recently about the schools that collapsed in Sichuan province, which killed thousands of children, and all the while buildings that stood right next door were relatively unharmed. Here's a NY Times article for more information about the problem. The schools, apparently, were not properly reinforced, made from substandard concrete, and were not even up to the lax building codes of China.
The building standards have been a source of constant wonder during my time in China. Most of the construction is done by peasant laborers who seem to have no formal training in building, and there seems to be little or no leadership in completing projects. Witnessing the progession of construction on the new campus of NWPU is a little bizarre: one thing gets completed, and then destroyed by subsequent progress, and then needs to be rebuilt. One example is when a construction vehicle smashed the newly formed concrete curbs because no one thought to put down some ramps for the truck to drive over. And apparently, the cracks that happened on the teaching buildings on campus after the first earthquake were not due to the ferocity of the shaking, but instead, the fact that during construction someone tiled over some parts of the building that were supposed to move - in case of an earthquake (This was pointed out by another foreign teacher who is training to become an architect).
In many cases with new buildings here, they look very classy and expensive when they are first built, but because of lack of upkeep or the use of shoddy materials, they very quickly look like crap. I recently learned that the hotel where I live was built just 4 years ago. Now, it really is not a bad place to live, but to anyone who has seen my apartment up close, it is amazing the kind of damage this place has sustained in just 4 years. Almost equally amazing is the fact that the hotel still charges $100 per night to stay in a room like mine.