One or two of the tubes protruding are hollow. Pilings usually are much longer, to bedrock if there is bedrock...I wouldn't call these pilings by any stretch of the imagination.
The whole thing with pilings is that they are driven deep enough that the friction exerted on all surfaces is greater than the load that they support, if there is no bedrock. The float in the substrate and you better hope you dont get much water on them if they are wood.
They may have driven a tube down and back filled it with concrete. Whatever they did, I won’t copy them. There was a thread on the building at the time. The builder bypassed local code, bribed the inspectors. IIRC, the building collapsed before it was even finished. The Chinese are inveterate gamblers, the builder was probably cutting corners for decades. I think he may have a found a limit.