BIM in Chinese High-Rise Building Projects: Challenges to Adoption and Strategic Recommendations

Building Information Modeling (BIM) is a key innovation for dealing with many issues troubling the construction industry, especially in dealing with complex projects, like high-rise building projects. Despite the well-documented benefits of BIM, such as increased efficiency, greater accuracy, better collaboration, and reduced errors in workflows, its adoption in China is still limited. This gap in adoption, given the context of rapid urbanization and increased demand in housing, presents a clear challenge in meeting industry expectations and other stakeholder requirements. Even though the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development acknowledges the advantages of BIM and actively encourages its integration into construction processes, there are still numerous barriers to its adoption. This research focuses on identifying the barriers that hinder the application of BIM and offers solutions to overcome these challenges, emphasizing on high-rise building projects in China. 200 close-ended questionnaires were distributed and 132 usable responses were received, resulting in a 66 percent response rate. Data was analyzed using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS). Respondents were balanced in terms of gender and most of them pose commendable education level and industry experience. Most of them also are directly linked to site-based operations hence, experienced insights were offered. As outlined in the analysis, major barriers that were noted include the need for advanced technical expertise, high implementation costs, and a limited understanding of BIM’s long-term ROI. Combined, these obstacles have created an insufficient pool of skilled BIM professionals and delayed industry-wide adoption. To resolve these concerns, ways forward include improving stakeholder communication to promote streamlined workflows, government policy action, strategic incentive design, targeted training program accessibility, and reduced financial barriers to adoption. Altogether, these approaches alleviate barriers associated with the integration of BIM technology in high-rise building construction in China.