Mayor Vince Gray recently returned from a week-long trip to China, where he courted investors for everything from the city’s streetcar network to a new development in Shaw. But beyond returning to D.C. with promises of Chinese largesse for local projects, Gray also gained an appreciation for how, well, diligent and dutiful Chinese workers are.

In an interview with Foreign Policy published yesterday, Gray repeatedly expressed fascination with the speed with which things get built in China.

“We had this plan to [put streetcars in D.C.] over 20 years,” he told the magazine. “And the folks that we’ve been working with there, who may be potential investors in the project, that was one of the first questions they raised. Twenty years?! Why 20 years? You ought to be able to do that in two or three years.”

Gray also noted that Beijing’s convention center—roughly equivalent to D.C.’s—took nine months to build, which is what it takes for Metro to replace broken escalators. “But the idea that it takes nine months to fix escalators! And people have these eloquently developed excuses. “The parts aren’t available.” It’s always somebody else’s fault,” said Gray.

Of course, Gray isn’t blind to what it takes to be so brutally productive. Still, he said, maybe the Chinese have something to teach D.C.:

Well there’s no question that they can get things done in ways that we can’t get things done—or won’t get them done, let’s put it that way. Some of the labor practices are probably not ones that would ever be tolerated in this city.

On the other hand, setting that aside for a second, my sense is that they work 24/7. We don’t do that. It’s not the same people, but why is it that on a project we’re working on everybody is out there from 7:00 or 7:30 in the morning and then goes home at 4:00 or 4:30

FP: Why do we use only a 40-hour work week?

VG: I don’t think there’s a good answer. It’s the same question I’ve asked about schools. Why do kids start school when they’re five? Why do kids get out of class at 3:00? Why are we still using an agrarian calendar to have kids get out of school in the middle of June and come back in August?… Who said eight hours a day is the right work day?

I’m not even talking about an individual. Let’s just assume that 8 hours is the right work day. Why can’t you have 16 hours—with two shifts of people? You can work at night—there’s no reason why that can’t be done… even if you have to use lighting or whatever, when you’re doing outdoor [jobs]. Think about it: The sun comes up at 5:30 or 6:00 a.m. and goes down at 8:30 or 9:00 at night. We don’t have the same sense of urgency that other people seem to have at this stage.

The Chinese have exported some of their methods to D.C., one could say. In 2006, Chinese workers were housed (to put it kindly) in a Days Inn on New York Avenue NE as they worked on the new Chinese Embassy compound located in Van Ness.