The Development History and Prospect of Steel Structure in China

China's steel structure industry has developed rapidly during the past 10 years or so, and has become a steel structure power with the largest amount of steel structure in the world, the strongest manufacturing and construction capacity, the first industrial scale, and the first enterprise scale. China's steel structure building started late, and in the early stage of development, due to the limitation of technology and construction equipment, it could not be completely localised, so in the actual construction, most of them adopted the mode of Chinese-foreign cooperation, and built a number of representative buildings, such as Shanghai Jinmao Tower, etc. Since the mid-1990s, some of China's steel structure buildings have been constructed with the largest amount of steel structure in the world. Since the mid-1990s, some construction enterprises in China have begun to research, develop and construct steel structure buildings independently with years of construction experience. Especially in the recent years, there are more and more steel structure buildings with completely independent intellectual property rights, and the construction technology is more and more mature. Although China had outstanding achievements in iron structure in the early days, it stayed at the level of iron buildings for a long time. It was not until the end of the 19th century that China began to adopt modern steel structures. After the founding of New China, the application of steel structure has developed greatly, and has far exceeded the past in both quantity and quality. With the rapid development of China's economy, the requirements for the quality and duration of buildings are getting higher and higher, and steel structure buildings precisely meet this requirement, and with the features of safety, reliability, duration saving and convenience of use, they are widely used in all kinds of buildings, including commercial buildings, recreational buildings, civil buildings and sports facilities buildings and so on. Especially for sports facilities buildings, the newly built stadiums in recent years in China have applied steel structure building technology without exception. In addition, the emergence of light steel structure building has expanded the application scope of steel structure building, and at present, some small construction projects have also begun to apply steel structure building technology and achieved better results.
The number of steel structure buildings marks the economic strength and economic development of a country or a region. In 2000, China's national economy grew significantly, the national strength has increased significantly, steel production has become a world power, in the construction of the proposed ‘active, reasonable use of steel’, from now on to get rid of the ‘restrictions on the use of steel’ of the bondage of steel structure buildings in economically developed areas gradually increased. Steel structure buildings are gradually increasing in economically developed areas. Especially before and after 2008, driven by the Olympic Games, there was a boom of steel structure buildings. Strong market demand drove the rapid development of steel structure buildings, and a large number of steel structure venues, airports, stations and high-rise buildings were built, among which some of them have world-class production and installation technology, such as the National Stadium of the Olympic Games, etc. After the Olympic Games, steel structure buildings were popularised by the public.
After the Olympic Games, steel structure buildings have been popularised and developed continuously, and steel structure has been widely used in buildings, railways, bridges and houses, etc. There are tens of thousands of steel structure enterprises of various scales, and the world's advanced steel structure processing equipments are basically complete, such as multi-head multi-dimensional drilling machines, multi-dimensional coherent line cutting machines for steel pipes, and corrugated plate automatic welding machine tools. And now hundreds of steel structure enterprises have world advanced level of processing and production, such as steel structure production special grade and first grade enterprises. In recent years, the steel output is as much as more than 600 million tonnes per year, and the varieties of steel can fully meet the needs of construction. The steel structure design specification, steel structure material standard, steel structure engineering construction quality acceptance specification, as well as various professional specifications and enterprise work methods are basically complete.