December 26, 2004
HOW DO YOU SAY YUKOS IN CHINESE?:
China's Elite Learn to Flaunt It While the New Landless Weep (JOSEPH KAHN, 12/25/04, NY Times)
Chateau Zhang Laffitte is no ordinary imitation. It is the oriental twin of Château Maisons-Laffitte, the French architect François Mansart's 1650 landmark on the Seine. Its symmetrical facade and soaring slate roof were crafted using the historic blueprints, 10,000 photographs and the same white Chantilly stone.Yet its Chinese proprietor, a Beijing real estate developer named Zhang Yuchen, wanted more. He added a manicured sculpture garden and two wings, copying the palace at Fontainebleau. He even dug a deep, broad moat, though uniformed guards and a spiked fence also defend the castle.
"It cost me $50 million," Mr. Zhang said. "But that's because we made so many improvements compared with the original."
Rising out of the parched winter landscape of suburban Beijing, like a Gallic apparition, the chateau is a quirky extravagance intended to catch the eye of China's new rich. They can rent its rooms and, later, buy homes amid the ponds, equestrian trails and golf course on Mr. Zhang's 1.5-square-mile estate.
It is even more conspicuous to its nearest neighbors, 800 now landless peasants who used to grow wheat on its expansive lawns.
In a generation, China's ascetic, egalitarian society has acquired the trappings and the tensions of America in the age of the robber barons. A rough-and-tumble form of capitalism is eclipsing the remnants of socialism. Those who have made the transition live side by side with those who have not, separated by serrated fences and the Communist Party.
Those betting on China's future are, among other foiolish risks, putting an awful lot of faith in its oligarchs being treated better than the Russians' are after the Party falls. Posted by Orrin Judd at December 26, 2004 11:18 AM
They've decided to copy pre-Revolutionary French. What can go wrong with that plan?
Posted by: pj at December 26, 2004 4:06 PMHow does one say "guillotine" in Chinese?
Posted by: ray at December 27, 2004 8:54 AMChina's robber barons though have had a much longer time to build their empires and time gives legitimacy. Russia had a panicked start in 1991. China's had market liberalization since, what, 1979? While some of these fortunes rest on stolen assets, there are also many gained from legitimate business. And the overseas Chinese community in Taiwan and SE Asia is also fuelling a lot of this.
China has always been overhyped, but it's too much to discount them into the trash bin.
Posted by: Chris Durnell at December 27, 2004 10:39 AMChris:
First, although market liberalization began in 1979, the kind of conspicuous consumption by the super rich that you now see in China didn't appear until much more recently. Second, what everyone is talking about here is the same general phenomenon that took place in France in the late 1700s. At the time in Bourbon France, as is happening in China today, the economy was undergoing a sea-change, while the old forms of political domination were despised and increasingly being attacked as obsolete. Remember your Charles Dickens? "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times."
Posted by: X at December 27, 2004 11:07 AM