I'm 100% sure its a photo op. Think about the logistics of the trucks taking spoil away. How can there be one arriving and one leaving at each location at this time: the diggers near instantly fill their entire capacity?
And the narrow access road is way too congested for all those to actually leave or arrive at that rate. Moments after the shot, the trucks will clearly all have to stop and wait.
This being said, there is power in that many machines in the same place at one time. They would cetainly be able to get work done quickly. Just not quite as quickly as it appears in that shot. Waiting is part of the process, you cant have a system where every component works at 100% capacity
A truck like this represents a substantial amount of investment that costs almost the same if its sitting there as it does doing actual work.
Not to mention the opportunity cost of having other similarly well equipped crews having to wait on you finishing the job.
Why would you be surprised that no time and effort is spared in coordinating the work of these machines? Its like being surprised that items are constantly rolling off the factory production line, and its not just the occasional item showing up at irregular intervals.
firstly, "doing useful work" for these trucks includes sitting still while being filled with spoil, not just driving around looking all fancy
it's not about simply "coordinating". Logistics requires that you have the capacity to absorb unforseen issues and delays. When you have a system with 100% utilisation, the slightest delay at one point ripples out upsetting the balance of everything else and suddenly everything grinds to a halt.
For a more techy example, it is a bad idea to have a server running at 100% CPU usage. If that is your "normal" state, any change in conditions for the worse (more customers want to buy your product because its a weekend) results in degraded experience or total failure for ALL the customers.
And construction (and large machines) just LOVE to throw delays at you.
I'm sure they have people who's job is coordinating. In fact to coordinate such a photo op would be an almighty feat in itself. It's just if those people are in any way good at planning (their job) then they would leave slack in the system, the exact amount is the real trick to avoid waste, but it's never 100% utilisation.
> coordinate such a photo op would be an almighty feat in itself
So why not coordinate the real thing instead of just a photo op. There plenty of idling equipment in the clip. This footage is pretty tame compared to rushed covid hospital construction, for which there were live streams and timelapse of activity greater than what's being shown. I've seen many PRC worksites like this IRL, it's about on par. Wouldn't be hard to launch a drone and flythrough through the busiest looking area for social media.
Everything you wrote applies equally to western countries, and yet the results are different as we all well know. Whatever the reason is why trucks and other equipment stand around doing nothing, a reason clearly exists, and is clearly missing from your argument.
It may be that there is something going on in China that negates the exact reason that exists, and not in other countries, but you said nothing about that.
The fact is this construction site looks different than the way construction sites look usually. Your "trucks are expensive" argument explains nothing and provides no reason for this site to look different than others. Trucks are expensive everywhere, actually I think trucks are more expensive in the west than in China.