The real Chinese problem is not the the brick themselves, but ecology and environmental. They use 500,000,000,000 brick per year, which is 500 brick for every man, woman and child, so the changeover will take time.
Due to the geology and geography, the cities are usually near a river; the good soil for food is along the rivers and the clay is under the good soil. The top soil is stripped and the clay is stripped down as far as the the decent clay is. When the shallow clay deposit is delpeted, there is no soil left to fill the excavation, so it can easily fill with water when abandoned. The wasteful use of valuable land, couple with the energy required to fire brick and the couples with the poor coal fuel quality lead to plants being shut down and the contractors build concrete products plants.
Concrete and concrete products were seleceted as the "preferred" wall laterials since they do not come from a horizontal land source and aggregates can be found in rivers (dredging) or in quarries and China has an abundance of rock and mountains. Cement can be made in efficient modern plant and economically be shipped by rail or water. The energy cost of concrete is much lower, the pollution much less and land use is minimal in a country that has very high land value and demand in the cities.
Because of the type of construction and durabillity, wood not an option, since China imports wood from the U.S., Russia and SE Asia for their small wood requirements. More buicks are sold in China than in the U.S. and Buick is 3rd in sales well behind Mercedes and BMW. This is spite of China being the worlds largest car market and being the largest vehicle manufacturing production.
