It seemed like the project was started with unclear/unvetted requirements, led by bureaucracy and image instead of engineering. China tends to do things the other way around.

That smoke exhaust system seems absurd - I don't know how the architectural plans even left the design phase. It should have been isolated and designed such that it could be replaced with a conventional approach cheaply.

The rest of the project sounds like a deadline-driven fixed-resource software project with incompetent management - hacks and cut corners everywhere.