From other photographs, you can see that they pulled up some pretty deep pilings, though, clearly, not enough and not deep enough. I knew a guy who was working construction of the first “skyscraper” in Cheasepeake, VA. The soil there is quite soft. They had to drive in a big number of piles until the strike of the hammer resulted in less than some specified motion, which I forget. The site was directly opposite town hall, and the mayor had done something to piss him off, so he always made sure to drive as many strikes as possible when the mayor was in the building.
The building in the photograph was build on soft soil and apparently building inspectors had been paid off, because the pilings were nowhere within shouting distance of local code. One side of the building quickly settled a lot faster than the other (what’s Chinese for “Oh shit!”) and, as they say in Shanghai, disaster ensued.
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.