I'm no engineer (civil or uncivil) but I noticed those shallow piles, too. Moreover, the closeups showed that they were hollow on the inside. One of the biggest construction costs is cement and there're loads of stories about how Chinese construction crews cut corners to save costs on cement. Witness the 7000 (?) school buildings that fell down in the Sichuan earthquake.
So here's the Lotus Garden in Minhang and a 13 story building falls over. And the piles look like hollowed out peg legs of a second story man.
In the aftermath of the Taipei earthquake in 1999, I remember reading that most buildings survived, but in one of the newer tall ones that *surprisingly* had collapsed, the foundation piles had broken open and they found that the supposedly solid concrete foundations had in fact been stacked water barrels in the center, "wrapped" in a thin veneer of concrete. Well, not so thin, but thick enough to pass inspections. But still, the piles had a pretty much hollow center when they should have been feet thick. And the earthquake opened 'em up for the inspectors to see.
This Minhang building looks like it had both shallow pilings and hollow pilings. Yet the building fell 13 floors from vertical to horizontal almost intact.
I say Lego construction with Chinese characteristics foundation and cement work.