China Container Construction Information

China, or as it's official known, the People's Republic of China, is a country that really needs no introduction. As the third-largest country by land area, and the first largest by population, everyone know's something about China.

It's a country with some of the world's largest cities and most beautiful geographies. And yet, due to a difficult-to-understand language and a restrictive government, there is a lot most people don't know about China.

One think you might know about China is that they are the truly the shipping container capital of the world. The vast majority of shipping containers are produced in China. This is a function of a couple of different things.

First is the relatively cheap labor and abundant infrastructure to manufacture them. Second is the fact that that China manufacturers and exports so many goods for the rest of the world that need containers in order to be shipped out.

With that in mind, you might expect Chinese container architecture to be very mature, and you're not wrong. But due to a lack of English-language media, many in the western world don't even know about a lot of the projects there.

Even with that working against us though, there are still a number of very impressive shipping container buildings in China. And with such a ready source of shipping containers, this is pretty logical.

Like most of the rest of the world, building with shipping containers in China requires regulatory approval. And while the process for individual cities and regions isn't perfectly transparent, we do have some understanding of building regulations at the national level in China.

It starts with the Chinese Ministry of Housing and Urban Rural Development (MOHURD), who handles the national residential code administratively. They, in turn, work with the China Academy of Building Research (CABR), among others, to get input on revising construction codes.

The CABR is a building research institution that develops, refines, and submits the technical construction standards back to the MOHURD. Once standards are approved, they are then made available via the GB Standards website.