The China Issue

Meet More Expats

GOOD — Tue, 20 May 2008 21:34:52 PDT

It's easy to feel outnumbered in a country of 1 billion people, especially for non-natives. But more and more foreigners are finding ways to make China feel like home. We profiled seven of them in Issue 010. Here are five more.

David Ben Kay

age 53

Where did you move from?
I moved to Beijing from Hong Kong, moved to Hong Kong from California.

How long have you been in China?

Eighteen years in Beijing. And if you mean greater China, including Hong Kong and Taiwan, then 25.

What do you do?

I work for Microsoft China as their piracy czar. I had previously been their general counsel and before that I was in private practice in a number of international law firms. For my "other job," I'm a designer and operate an art gallery-which is also my pied-à-terre.

Why did you move?

In a word: yuanfen, often translated as "destiny" or "fate." It comes from a Taoist concept that views the cosmos like fabric, with people, time, events, and places running along the continuum of the warp and woof of the fabric. Where the warp and woof cross is where yuanfen occurs. A thousand seeming coincidences from childhood on brought me to China. It's where I'm supposed to be.

What do you miss?

There's only one thing I miss: really good Mexican food-okay, Tex-Mex food. Every time I land in Denver (where I was born), I immediately head to Señor Pepe's for my fix: a chile relleno, cheese enchiladas, a smothered burrito, and guacamole.

Any plans to come back?

No.

Jeffrey Ludlow

age 30

Where did you move from?

Rotterdam, and before that Los Angeles.

How long have you been in China?

Four years between Shanghai, Hong Kong, and now Beijing.

What do you do?

I work for design companies working within the architecture field.

Why did you move?

I came to China to see what this building boom was about. Unlike the States or Europe, where getting experience required waiting for positions to open up, here they just thrust you into responsibility and new project possibilities.

How much Chinese do you speak?

I'm able to order food and navigate a taxi, thanks to the best tutors, waiters, and taxi drivers.

How much do you hang out with other expats?

I just want to relax and hang out with friends whom I can relate to easily. Unfortunately, this is 70 percent so-called expats. I don't understand this whole expat classification. No one views immigrant communities within the States with such loaded connotations of colonialism.

Any funny stories?

When I first moved to China, I went to several grocery stores only to find that the milk expiration date was the same everywhere [and that it had all expired]. What I didn't realize was that the date on milk cartons was the date when they put the product on the shelf.

Any plans to come back?

I have been saying for a couple of years that I wanted to leave the Chinese rat race, but the opportunities and projects that have come about make it hard to leave.

Sean Leow

age 26

Where did you move from?

San Francisco.

How long have you been in China?

Five years.

What do you do and how did you end up doing it?

Chinese creatives-musicians, artists, writers, designers-are underrepresented by mainstream Chinese media and lack effective distribution options. My company, Neocha.com, helps these young and emerging "creatives" promote themselves by aggregating their work online and organizing a variety of offline events ranging from creative bazaars and concerts to art exhibitions and online contests.

Why did you move?

My father is Hakka Chinese and, while I was raised in the U.S., I always wanted to reconnect with the Chinese half of my heritage. After graduating from college, I moved to China and have not left.

How much Chinese do you speak?

I speak it fluently. I went to graduate school in China, 90 percent of my work is in Chinese and I have a Chinese blog.

What should people in America know about China?

The gap between the young and old generations in China is huge right now. The urban youth are driven by a capitalist mentality, are uninterested in politics, and live in a digital world. One of the most common observations made by my Chinese friends is how they don't understand their parents and how their parents understand them even less.

Any plans to come back?

Yes, I'll move back in a couple years. I think it's healthy to continually change your perspective on the world and staying in China for too long can make you jaded.

Jeremy Goldkorn

age 36

Where did you move from?

South Africa.

How long have you been in China?

Thirteen years.

What do you do and how did you end up doing it?

I own and edit Danwei.org, a website about media and news in China. I started it four years ago after working in the media and advertising industries for most of the previous decade.

How much Chinese do you speak?

I can speak, read, and write, but Chinese people still laugh at my mistakes.

How much do you hang out with other expats?

Beijing is not a happy place if you don't like the company of Chinese people, but I also need friends from other countries. One of the best things about living in Beijing is the variety of foreigners here. It easy to meet people from all over the globe-from Azerbaijan to Zambia.

What should people in America know about China?

It's not all kung fu, silk, Communists, and sweatshops. The country that most reminds me of China is the United States: both are huge countries with socially and geographically mobile populations that have an incredible work ethic and an inflated sense of self-importance.

What do you miss?

What do I miss? Free media.

Any plans to come back?

Come back to where?

Virginia Hunt

age 30

Where did you move from?

Boston.

How long have you been in China?

Seven years.

What do you do and how did you end up doing it?

Here in Shanghai, I manage a children's learning center, teach children ages 5 to 9 and am completing a children's storybook.

Why did you move?

I originally came to China to work in education, learn about the educational industry here, and study Chinese.

How much Chinese do you speak?

I have a working proficiency in Chinese. My friends are constantly helping me with my poor grammar.

What should people in America know about China?

China is developing and changing faster than a growing child. I advise all those interested to hop on a plane and check it out, while it is still moderately inexpensive. The demographics of cities like Shanghai and Beijing are changing quickly as well. I am a black American female with Caribbean parents. I have been surprised by how many black Americans and Caribbeans alone have settled in Shanghai since 2004.

Any plans to come back?

I do plan to return to the U.S. sometime soon, although the time is not yet set in stone.

Ten Reasons Why China Matters To You

Thomas P.M. Barnett — Wed, 2 Apr 2008 13:03:11 PDT

Don't be scared of China-the country is perfectly positioned to be our most powerful ally (lack of democracy notwithstanding, of course). But if there is anything to worry about, it's not China's massive military; it's the economy, stupid.

Why China Matters To You:

When President Richard Nixon reopened diplomatic ties with Mao Zedong's communist China in 1972, he enabled the most profound global economic dynamic of the last half century: China's historic reemergence as a worldwide market force. Nothing shapes your world today more than China's rise, and nothing will shape our planet's future more-for good or ill-than China's ongoing trajectory.

After centuries of relative isolation, China's rapid reintegration into the global economy transformed globalization from its narrow Cold War-era base (the West) to its current "majority" status, whereby two-thirds of humanity now enjoys deep and growing connectivity with international markets and the remaining third works toward it. China's decision to rejoin the world was globalization's tipping point, meaning-absent global war-there's no turning back now, only adaptation.

If Nixon opened the door, then Mao's successor Deng Xiaoping led the Chinese people through it. Unlike Mikhail Gorbachev, Deng chose wisely: By tackling economic freedom before political liberalization, Deng kept China stable during its tenuous first years of market reform. Although Deng is correctly labeled an autocrat (he ordered the bloody suppression of the Tiananmen Square democracy protests in 1989), he is also correctly identified as a modernizer who unleashed a generation's immense creativity.

Many from that generation will tell you that, before Tiananmen, they felt freedom was "90 percent political and 10 percent economic," but after Deng's crackdown, they concluded-somewhat harshly-that real freedom was "90 percent economic and 10 percent political." In other words, they decided that markets were the first, best instruments for generating positive change in China.

A grand bargain was struck: Deng won military support for further market reforms so long as a lid was kept on political change, and the army was afforded enough of a budget to modernize. The Party would remain supreme, but state involvement in the economy would shrink and private business would be encouraged along with investment from, and trade with, the outside world.

China has experienced incredible economic growth ever since, increasing its gross domestic product annually by almost 10 percent-as fast as you dare expand. But China is also nowhere near becoming a democracy, and its achievement scares nations around the world-and excites others-because it suggests that you can rapidly embrace globalization, achieve great income growth, and remain a single-party state by following the so-called China model.

China's modernization strategy included slowing population growth through the "one-child policy." Yet China remains huge: 1.3 billion souls crammed into a country no larger than our own. So if you think we've added quite a few Hispanics in the last couple of decades, imagine inviting everyone in the Western Hemisphere and half of Africa to come live inside the United States, because that would give us China's crowded mix of rich and poor.

Given China's traditions, the one-child policy favors males over females; the latter are too often aborted or offered up for international adoption. (Disclosure: My fourth child originally hailed from Jiangxi province.) The build-up of males has led some Western demographers to worry that over time, China will inevitably become militarily aggressive-how else to distract all those frustrated young men? But this fear is overblown, as is evidenced by trends in the rest of Asia, where, for example, similarly frustrated South Korean males simply go abroad and, you know, marry a broad in places like Vietnam or Thailand. Bottom line? Desire wins out.

The more profound legacy of the one-child policy is that China will grow very old, very fast. Right now the country enjoys a demographic sweet spot: plenty of workers supporting relatively few children or elders. But once you restrict the baby supply, the population as a whole moves up collectively in age, meaning that China will rapidly progress toward the "Florida mark" (20 percent of the population above age 65) in just two decades. The United States will hit Florida around the same time. If America, in all its wealth, is struggling with that profound shift, how much harder do you think it will be for China, weighed down by hundreds of millions of impoverished peasants?

Here's one thing to remember when anyone tries to sell you on China running the world someday soon: that China will get very old before it gets truly rich, something the world has never witnessed before. What history tells us is this: Aging populations are not aggressive populations.

Impossible, you say. Ruled by communists, China's civilization bears no resemblance to our own.

But China's true "communist" period was just three decades out of a 5,000-year history, the rest of which featured a social bent toward markets in general (the Chinese are inveterate gamblers, for example) and past periods of serious global trade connectivity (recall the Silk Road of yore). Add in the strong focus on family ties and a deep spiritual history that has long featured free competition among various faiths and we're not exactly talking about some brother from another planet.

So forget trying to figure out today's China through its own history, an endless cycle of disintegrating peace and integrating war. Think about it this way: Right now, China is somewhere in the historical vicinity of "rising America" circa 1880-absent democracy, of course. Once you realize that, then depending on where you go around China, you can locate yourself somewhere in the last 125 years of America's own ascendancy.

Some examples: Foreign policy-wise, you're looking at a mild-mannered Teddy Roosevelt: China's military stick is getting bigger, but it still prefers to speak softly, mostly threatening small island nations (read: Taiwan) off its coast.

The nation is likewise undergoing a construction and investment boom that's right out of 1920s America, and frankly, that should give pause to anyone concerned with global economic stability. China's banking and financial industries are about as regulated as ours were prior to the Great Crash of 1929. But there's no sign of a slowdown. Shanghai already has 4,000 skyscrapers-twice as many as New York-and plans another thousand.

Check out China's space program, which just put its first man in orbit. Beijing now speaks openly of repeating our 1960s quest for the moon. Groovy! Let me just raise my glass of Tang in salute and wonder why Americans aren't on Mars yet. Speaking of which, there's also a sexual revolution brewing, with China's urban youth taking one great leap forward from Father Knows Best to Sex and the City. This revolution won't be televised, but it's being compulsively blogged.

Corruption-wise, Beijing remains stuck somewhere prior to the Progressive Era of late-19th-century America, and that's no good. China's political system needs to be able to process all this social and economic pressure with more flexibility. Citizens are simply growing angrier and more demanding with each passing year. China's legal system also needs to clean up its act, because the more China's economy opens up, the more the global business community is going to demand greater transparency and better avenues for legal redress. Corruption already consumes upwards of 5 percent of China's gross domestic product. In a "flat world" of economic hypercompetitiveness, such inefficiency eventually costs too much.

Globalization tends to integrate trade by disintegrating global supply chains. By breaking up these chains, globalization spreads various segments of production and assembly across those economies that offer the cheapest labor for each particular stage. China has deftly inserted itself into a long list of these chains, becoming the final assembler of note in toys, cell phones, CD players, computers, and auto parts, to name but a few. By doing so, China has consolidated much of Asia's previous trade surpluses with America into its own burgeoning bilateral trade with the United States. So when you hear about America's huge trade deficit with China, bear in mind that it's the same huge trade deficit we've long had with Asia as a whole.

Also be aware that this figure hides a lot of complexity. Foreign corporations control the majority (approximately two-thirds) of this production for export. American companies in particular dominate China's U.S.-export sector, meaning it's basically our companies renting Chinese labor and keeping much of the profit. The Chinese export that sells for hundreds of dollars in America nets only tens of dollars for the Chinese economy. That's how Wal-Mart, the single biggest source for Chinese exports in the world, keeps its prices so low. So if you think Western companies are exploiting cheap Chinese labor, then understand that you're a prime beneficiary.

Naturally, China's deep penetration of the U.S. market has raised product-safety issues. Any economy that is growing as fast as China's cuts plenty of corners. But realize that China learns by scandals just as America did over the past century. Frankly, the best crises are the ones you actually hear about, because that means the international press got ahold of them, and those already affected or at risk will get the information they need to protect themselves. Once tracked back to China, Beijing is put on public notice that whatever laxness exists simply cannot be tolerated anymore, with threats of quarantine, bans on exports, cessation of investment flows, and so on.

A generation ago, such threats would elicit yawns from China's ruling elite, but now, with the Communist Party's legitimacy riding on economic expansion, they're taken with the utmost seriousness. In short, China's government is starting to act more like a business which recognizes that its reputation is often its most important asset, because fierce competition means that today's mistake allows somebody else to steal your customers by the start of business tomorrow.

China's explosive economic growth forces it to suck in resources from all over the world. As James Kynge, a longtime China-watcher, notes in his recent book China Shakes the World, "China's endowments are deeply lopsided." Blessed with too many people, China is short on just about everything else: arable land, water, energy, and raw materials of all sorts. Thus, the only way China manages to serve as globalization's "manufacturing floor" is to become a leading global importer of virtually any commodity you can name, from cement and copper to oil and gas.

While there's hardly anything wrong about that, China's insatiable demand for resources likewise drives Beijing to actively court pariah states and "rogue regimes" while the West tries to isolate the same regimes with economic sanctions. Take China's relationship with Iran: While American diplomats work night and day to level even harsher sanctions to slow down Tehran's reach for the bomb, China quietly edges out Japan as Iran's major energy investor, sweetening the deal by reselling it some of that fabulous high-tech military hardware the Chinese military imports from Israel-hardware which then turns up in southern Lebanon in the hands of Hezbollah.

On the face of it, that constitutes obstructionism on China's part, as if it's trying to prevent the global community from cracking down on bad behavior. But the inescapable truth is that China's scramble to find resources means it has to cut deals with anybody, no matter their disreputable record. So while Sudan's government engages in what many Western states consider to be "ethnic cleansing" or genocide in its Darfur region, China is more than happy to invest heavily in Sudan's oil industry while supplying the Sudanese government with weapons. Do that long enough and you'll have Hollywood stars galore decrying your hoped-for coming-out party as the "genocide Olympics."

But the longer-term danger is this: China is getting awfully dependent on a lot of unstable countries without having the global military footprint of a great power-you know, like somebody building a very large house made of straw, nowhere near a fire station. When bad things happen-like, say, that one afternoon nine Chinese oil-rig workers were killed by rebels in eastern Ethiopia-China can't respond like a military power you should fear, because it needs that oil. Once that reality sinks in with local bad actors, expect them to start squeezing Beijing for their own slice of protection money. You know that Thomas Friedman bit about America funding both sides of the "war on terror"? Well, this is how that sort of thing starts.

Today, China might get by simply by buying off every dictator it can. But that won't work in a future world defined by hyperconnectivity, where everyone can witness the human implications of China's deal-making. Nor will it work in a future world defined by hyperinterdependency, a world China is creating-whether it realizes it or not.

I'm considered a "panda hugger," someone who rationalizes China's current lack of democracy and argues that, despite all its selfish behavior, China should be considered by America more as a potential ally than a downstream threat. Being an economic determinist (I taught Marxism at Harvard in another life), I believe economics shapes politics more than the other way around. Thus, I tend to be patient when I see an autocratic regime marketizing its economy, especially when the economy opens up to globalization's networks.

So when I draw up a list of regimes I'd like to see forcibly changed by the global community, China's nowhere near the "to do" range. That doesn't mean I want Washington to forgo pushing Beijing's leaders in the direction of increasing political freedom and transparency, it just means that I have more faith in the transformative power of markets than others do, so I don't argue for picking fights with China on that score when I think there are so many other, more urgent situations around the planet today that we could collectively address.

"Panda sluggers" refers to those politicians, writers, and activists who make just the opposite argument: China has had plenty of time to change politically in a manner commensurate with its embrace of markets and globalization. If Beijing's ruling elite has managed to keep such a firm grip on political power, then maybe it's really cracked the code on "authoritarian capitalism," meaning we're looking at an inherently antagonistic model of development. If so, America had better wake up to that reality and start combating China's "soft power" influence-peddling around the world.

This view dovetails with trade protectionists who say that Washington must confront Beijing over its unfair trade practices and defense hawks who say similar things over China's rising military spending. My counterargument? When America was a rising power around the beginning of the last century, we were highly protectionist. Now that we're advanced, we'd like everybody else to follow our example. Fair? All things being equal, yes. But all things aren't equal when you're trying to catch up, the way China is today. I say, if you talk them into becoming capitalists, then you have to live with the consequences and be patient.

What concerns me most about this ongoing debate is the potential for the perfect triggering crisis to come along and decisively shift public opinion in favor of the "slugger" position, launching America down some path of economic retaliation against and/or military confrontation with China. Obvious security situations spring to mind, such as North Korea's nuclear program, Iran's nuclear program, or some significant U.S. military intervention in Pakistan-a longtime strategic ally of China.

But a more likely trigger is an extended economic downturn in the United States, or a financial panic in China following the bursting of some stock market bubble. If seriously threatened, might China decide to divest itself of U.S. currency-China currently holds $1.4 trillion in U.S. dollar reserves-sending the value of the dollar into a tailspin? No one knows for sure, but intelligent observers realize that, as former treasury secretary Lawrence Summers has put it, there basically exists a financial "balance of terror" between our two economies, meaning that when either of us pulls the economic trigger, we may well both end up with fatal wounds.

American businesses face a key decision: dive into China's dynamic markets or risk missing out on their coming wave of innovation. Nowhere is this more true than in infrastructure development, which is expanding like gangbusters in China right now and will continue to do so for the next couple of decades. Good example: China is building freeways like crazy. In about 20 years, it'll have roughly 50,000 miles of them-the equivalent of our interstate system.

In that time, the world will spend $10 trillion for infrastructure development in energy ($6 trillion) and water ($4 trillion). Most will happen inside China and India at a pace not witnessed on this planet since America spread its network westward following our Civil War. Naturally, environmentalists are worried. If China replicates our resource-intensive style of growth throughout its economy, there will be no end to its pollution and carbon emissions. If you've spent any time in China, you know what I'm talking about: acrid-tasting air that the U.N. estimates is responsible for the premature death of 400,000 Chinese a year. Now add in the four times as many cars and trucks that will be on Chinese roads in 20 years' time, along with far more urbanization and industrialization, and tell me if that sounds sustainable.

But guess what? The Chinese themselves aren't exactly clueless on the subject. After all, they live there. So I'm betting-and I admit this is a bet-that the Chinese, along with the Indians and emerging markets elsewhere, will be smarter than that. Not because they want to be, but because they're forced to be. These rising economies will have to zig where we zagged, and how they zig will be important, not just for the "advanced" West, but for all those emerging markets to come in places like Africa.

Globalization now impinges on the most traditional, off-the-grid societies in the world. Not surprisingly, there's going to be plenty of cultural blowback triggered by that process, and some of it is going to come our way in the form of transnational terrorism-just as it did on 9/11.

For America to win a long war against radical extremism, we need to make globalization truly global by integrating the one-third of humanity whose noses remain pressed to the glass, wondering when they'll be let in to the party. That's labor-intensive, and American workers price out far too high. Yes, we must be significantly involved, but it's not going to be Americans-much less Europeans-who do the heavy lifting. No, it's going to be those longtime frontier laborers of the global economy-the Chinese and other Asians. The highly networked Chinese have shown up like clockwork at every frontier globalization has ever created. Currently, more than a million Chinese nationals have turned up in Africa alone, engaging in what I call preemptive nation-building. It's great that China has triggered a commodities boom over much of Africa. God knows those economies can use all the help they can get. But the longer it looks like China is just there for the raw materials, the more Africans are going to catch on to the fact that-for now-the Chinese aren't doing any more for the continent's long-term development than the European colonial powers did decades ago.

But China needs our help, too. As the Chinese become increasingly dependent on resources drawn from unstable regions-by 2020, roughly 70 percent of China's oil imports will be from the Middle East-the country must continue leveraging U.S. military power. Otherwise, it'll be left unduly subsidizing weak or corrupt regimes, with China's economic connectivity put at risk by local warlords, chronic insurgencies, and radical extremists bent on driving out globalization's networks. If America can't afford to maintain global security on its own, and China can't afford to replace our effort on its own, then a strategic alliance makes eminent sense.

A significant portion of our national-security establishment wants desperately to cast China as an inevitable long-term threat. Why? Part of it is simply habit, as most who argue this line spent the bulk of their professional lives in the Cold War and just can't imagine a world that doesn't feature a superpower rivalry. For those who need to fill that hole, China is the best show in town, because its military buildup allows these hawks to argue that America must buy and maintain a huge, high-tech military force for potential large-scale war with the Chinese.

My counter is this: China's military buildup is not historically odd. America did the same as it became a global economic power in the late decades of the 19th century. Remember Teddy Roosevelt and the Great White Fleet? It's the same logic we see with China today.

But won't events put China and the United States at odds-say, over the strategic issues of fostering stability in the Persian Gulf? Hardly. Right now the United States imports only about one-tenth of the Persian Gulf's oil exports, with the vast bulk heading east to Asia. Frankly, there's no sense in the strategic equation "American blood (spilled) for Chinese oil (imports secured)." As China's oil imports skyrocket in coming years, unlike ours, do you think that's a politically sustainable situation?

My larger, more long-term fear is that by keeping China our preferred threat, we deny ourselves access to its significant military manpower and growing budget. With Europe and Japan both aging dramatically and China's strategic interests ballooning in unstable regions, this makes no sense. Better to lock in China as soon as possible as the land-power anchor of an East-Asian version of NATO. The sooner we achieve that, along with Korea's reunification, the sooner we can draw down our military in the region and better employ it in hotter spots around the world, eventually with Chinese (and Indian) troops helping out.

What would a strategic alliance with China look like? It won't come as some "grand bargain" achieved in a single summit, but rather a long-term buildup of trust through coalition operations. Asia is an obvious focal point for such cooperation, but a complex one. Far better in the short run would be to create a strategic dialogue between the Pentagon's nascent Africa Command and the Chinese military regarding joint peacekeeping and humanitarian operations in Africa. By focusing on that relatively clean slate, America and China could come together to explore what our military alliance could ultimately entail.

China is on the verge of a generational leadership change that will profoundly shape its emergence as a global power over the next decade. America should take advantage of this new group's eagerness to play an actively constructive role in international affairs.

To make clear how this would work, here's a quick primer on the generations of Chinese leaders since 1949: Mao personified the first generation, Deng the second. Deng was followed by a third generation fronted by Jiang Zemin, China's president and party boss across the 1990s. What's important to note about the third generation is that this cohort was largely educated in the Soviet Union during the 1950s. The technocratic flavor of that formative experience emboldened these leaders to extend Deng's economic reforms far deeper into Chinese society, even as the leaders steadfastly refused political liberalization.

That brings us to the current, or fourth, generation of leaders, represented by President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao, a risk-avoiding pair who have been quietly at the helm of "peacefully rising" China since 2002. Internally, their focus has been on harmonizing the huge imbalance between the booming coastal provinces and the left-behind rural poor of the interior.

Since 9/11, China has been almost invisible in international security affairs, essentially free riding on America's vigorous prosecution of both radical Islam's global insurgency and the so-called Axis of Evil, despite being a potentially key player. After all, China has long stood as North Korea's patron and now emerges as a dynamic investor for energy and raw-materials providers throughout the Middle East and Africa.

But understand this: China's fourth-generation leaders did not travel abroad in the 1960s for their college education, trapped as they were by the Cultural Revolution. So it's hardly a surprise that these homebodies have proven reticent to step out internationally. But that's changing as China's fifth-generation leaders-in-waiting step into senior positions of power. Starting in the late 1970s, many of them were educated right here in the United States-the birthplace of today's market-driven globalization. All but penciled in for future top slots last fall at the Communist Party's supreme gathering, this group has already begun its years-long transition to rule, slated to begin officially in 2012. Increasingly, China's next leadership generation speaks openly of the nation's achievement of great power status.

How America engages China's emerging elite in coming years could well determine-for good or ill-the lasting contours of the most important bilateral relationship of the 21st century. The scariest aspect to this relationship right now is that America's economic interdependency with China vastly outweighs the two nations' political and, more important, military connectivity. Bind America and China together, and globalization cannot be derailed. But set them persistently at odds, and that's a recipe for unacceptable danger.

What’s Up With China?

GOOD — Tue, 1 Apr 2008 18:11:19 PDT

They Go to Vegas!

They Win Medals!

They Like Hip Hop!

China FAQ Part 1

The nine men who control China, China's ten largest companies, and more

China FAQ Part 2

Seven Chinese cities bigger than New York, China's Olympic medal count, and more

Moving Pictures

Jia Zhang Ke — Tue, 1 Apr 2008 00:47:10 PDT

Unknown Pleasures (2002)

Because I was born in 1970, my earliest memories are of the Cultural Revolution-meetings, for example, many meetings, with tens of thousands of people attending. I remember when the fifth volume of Mao's collected writings was released, and all the people in our tiny town in Shanxi province had to line the streets to welcome its arrival at the bookstore. I remember not having enough to eat, because China was very poor. Then, when I started school, in 1977, the Cultural Revolution ended, and the reform era began.

And because those first years of reform, from 1978 to 1989, coincided with my growing up, my experience of how China changed is profoundly personal. From hunger, I began to have things to eat. After only having a radio in the house, we got a television and a washing machine. Where before art and literature had served purely as propaganda for government policy, we started to have popular culture-now we could hear pop songs from Hong Kong and Taiwan. This went on until I graduated from high school, in June, 1989, at the precise moment of the Tiananmen Square demonstrations. So my adolescence happened while the state was utterly transforming the lives of each and every individual Chinese. In many ways it is still like this today-perhaps not as pronounced, but each political change, each policy shift has an immense influence on individual lives. And so when I began to make movies, this is where my attention turned.

Since before I was born, Chinese were taught to think in terms of the collective. Every factory worker was educated to think he or she was just a tiny screw in a vast machine. You are not yourself, you are part of something else, and only in this something else does your life have meaning or value. Then, in the 1980s, as the markets opened, notions of self-consciousness and the idea that every individual had a value, emerged. So, as a filmmaker, I have focused on Chinese individuals, particularly those not living in Beijing or Shanghai, but in more remote places like my home province of Shanxi. I am interested in an ordinary Chinese person's experience, how he feels, and how, even in a peripheral locale, someone's life can be affected by larger events.

My film Platform is about young people in a traveling performance troupe in the 1980s. It seems simple, but previously, there was no such thing in China as free travel. In the past, as someone from the provinces, I would need an official letter to go to Beijing, saying what I was coming to do; otherwise no hotel or guesthouse would take me. In the 1980s, regulations loosened, and the characters in my film are an example of that; their itinerant performances are a way of achieving a kind of freedom. Yet the film ends in 1989, when the young people return to Shanxi, and their life returns to how it was before. So you could say that in my films, or in Chinese people's real lives, the individual is constantly struggling to actualize him or herself, but there is always a hand pressing down from above.

Jia (in red) on location filming

Before I made my first film, Pickpocket, I originally intended to shoot a love story-I even received funding for it-but then I returned to my hometown of Fenyang, where I suddenly discovered that its 3,000-year-old main street was about to be torn down. Such massive, sudden change made me feel that I had to be just as quick to shoot the things that were disappearing. So I came up with a new scenario and made a different movie, and this approach has continued to guide me. My last feature, Still Life, came about because I visited the Three Gorges dam intending to shoot a documentary about a painter who was working there, but once I saw the overwhelmingly surreal quality of that landscape in transition, I knew it also needed to be captured. The buildings looked like ruins. It was as if aliens had come, or as if there had been a war. So it was the space that first grabbed me, and it brought me to the people and their lives, and then to a story. It wasn't my intention to film something about Three Gorges-it was something that evolved.

In China, film is the artistic medium that the government cares most about, and the old censorship system is still largely in place. Lenin said that of all the arts, film was the most important to the proletariat, and I think he was right, because at a basic level, it transcends written language. An illiterate man with no way of reading novels or newspapers can appreciate film. Because the Communist Party has always relied on mass media to broadcast its policies, it thus has to pay attention to what films are saying. And so, even today, although there have been great changes and a great loosening, the system maintains control: All movies have to be approved in Beijing, first at the script stage, and then once the film is finished.

When I started making films, in 1997, there were stirrings of a new movement. After the crackdown at Tiananmen Square, intellectuals had begun to leave the state system. Writers emerged who weren't part of the national writers union, and independent movies by Zhang Yuan and Wang Xiaoshuai began to appear. When I started at the Beijing Film Academy, in 1993, it was natural for me as a young person to favor these, and to dislike movies coming out of the official system, or, even more, to want some distance from that system. Behind all of this was another reality: The economy was beginning to take off, and friends were starting businesses and making money. So there were funds available-not a lot, but enough-to make films. It was no longer like before, when the state system was the only game in town.

So, when I made Pickpocket, I gave no thought to the censors. We just wanted to make the film the way we wanted. In 1998 it showed at the Berlin film festival, and then in 1999 I was banned from making films. This ban had no expiration date, and it meant that I was on a blacklist at all the postproduction companies in Beijing and Shanghai, saying that I couldn't borrow equipment or develop film.

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Digital technology and the growth of the internet have permanently curtailed the government's control both over filmmakers' ideology, and over the apparatus of production and distribution.

Many people don't understand how I then made Platform and, later, Unknown Pleasures, under a ban that wasn't actually lifted until I made The World. But by that point, the overall openness and freedom of China had made it impossible for the government to restrict the filmmaking activity of a single individual-we just made the films. Working under a ban is truly nothing special; it requires no particular daring, and risks no real danger. Before, you needed access to film stock, and then you had to smuggle it out of the country to edit, but now I can tuck a DV tape into my pocket. More interestingly, by 2000, pirated DVD versions of my films started to circulate inside China, and so any Chinese person could finally see them. Of course, pirating means I suffer, because we the filmmakers have no revenue from distribution inside of China, but ultimately, digital technology and the growth of the internet have permanently curtailed the government's control both over both filmmakers' ideology and over the apparatus of production and distribution.

In the context of China, I also think DVD piracy is useful. I went through a long period during which my knowledge of film came from reading scripts, or listening to other people's descriptions. I knew about Godard, Truffaut, and films like Kramer vs. Kramer and On Golden Pond, but I hadn't seen any of them. China had these films, but they were locked away in an archive, to be seen by film insiders and people with special privileges. Ordinary citizens had no chance. So I thought that if I could get into the Beijing Film Academy, I could finally see these films. Then, after I became a director, I started writing articles to say that the system was unfair, that really all Chinese should be able to see these films. So, although everyone understands that it is a crime, piracy also opened up film to the people. Overnight, it was as if a thousand film archives opened on street corners: art films, comedy, porn-everything is all there.

At the moment, I'm editing my next film, 24 City, about workers in an old military factory in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province. Factory workers are the people whose fate has changed the most drastically of anyone in China. Before 1990, they had the highest status because they had stable salaries in a planned economy, but since then they have been marginalized: the larger and more prestigious the state factory, the worse the unemployment. After looking at a lot of factories, I found Factory 240, a former airplane-engine plant. It had 20,000 employees and 100,000 dependents, but had essentially ceased production. Its land was bought by a real estate company that has now torn down Factory 240 and built a condominium complex called "24 City." A literal decimation: reduced from 240 to 24! I started filming before the demolition, and shot there at various times for about a year. If you go there now, they've started selling the apartments for approximately $70 per square foot, which is expensive for Chengdu. The workers still live on the compound, playing mahjong and drinking tea.

As soon as we finish with 24 City, I will make Shuangxiong Hui, about the Communists and the Nationalists in Hong Kong in 1949. When shooting Still Life, I found my interest turning to history, because when you look closely at contemporary China, you begin to realize that many problems are the result of historical issues that were never properly solved. All the problems are left over-including the Cultural Revolution and 1949-and still haunt us now.

The Films Of Jia Zhang Ke

PICKPOCKET (1997)

As former associates reinvent themselves as "entrepreneurs" in the new China, a petty provincial thief fails to change with the changing times.

PLATFORM(2000)

The economic and cultural reforms of the 1980s as reflected in the changing fortunes of a traveling performance troupe: starting the decade as the state-sponsored Peasant Culture Group of Fenyang, it privatizes to become the All-Star Rock 'n' Breakdance Electronic Band.

UNKNOWN PLEASURES (2002)

A pair of unemployed teenagers drift through the disorienting new capitalist landscape of Datong, their days a seeming haze of karaoke, video games, and pirated DVDs.

THE WORLD (2004)

Workers in a Disneyesque theme park outside of Beijing embody the collision of globalization and provincialism in comic and heartbreakingly sad ways.

STILL LIFE (2006)

A man and a woman come to Fengjie, a town destroyed in the construction of the Three Gorges Dam, each in search of a spouse they haven't seen in years, both dwarfed by the massive demolition in process all around them.

DONG (2006)

A documentary about the figurative painter Liu Xiaodong; filming him make portraits of workers at Three Gorges inspired Jia to make Still Life.

USELESS (2007)

A documentary about the fashion designer Ma Ke, whose high-end designs are inspired by peasant workers, examines the underpinnings of modern consumption.

And Eight other Films about Contemporary China

ON THE BEAT (1995) Directed by Ning Ying

A funny, quietly observant film about Beijing policemen captures the city just at the point when Westernization is starting to creep in.

THE GATE OF HEAVENLY PEACE (1996) Directed by Geremie Barmé, David Carnochan, Richard Gordon, Gail Hershatter, Carma Hinton

A devastating and definitive documentary account of the 1989 demonstrations at Tiananmen Square.

SOUZHOU RIVER (2000) Directed by Lou Ye

An ultra-stylish romantic thriller, set in the seedy bars and back alleys of Shanghai.

BLIND SHAFT(2003) Directed by Li Yang

The noirish tale of a pair of murderous coal miners that also serves as an indictment of working conditions in impoverished rural regions.

A WORLD WITHOUT THIEVES (2004) Directed by Feng Xiaogang

Feng is often likened to Steven Spielberg for his slick sentimentality; his best films, such as this story of rival con artists on a cross-country train, are deft and surprising.

MOUNTAIN PATROL: KEKEXILI (2004) Directed by Lu Chuan

In China's northeastern mountains, a group of hard-boiled Tibetans band together to keep their endangered antelope population safe from poachers.

CRAZY STONE (2006) Directed by Ning Hao

It's a zany free-for-all as an assortment of schemers and thieves attempt to get their hands on a piece of jade that may prove valuable enough to thwart the shuttering of an old-line factory.

LOST IN BEIJING (2007) Directed by Li Yu

The owner of a Beijing massage palace clashes with a masseuse and her husband in a film that explores class conflict and the corrosive effect of money on modern values.

CHINA BLUE (2007) Directed by Mischa X. Peled

Shot secretly in a Guangdong factory that manufactures blue jeans for Western companies, this documentary follows a handful of young, underpaid Chinese laborers.

The New China

Adam Matthews — Tue, 1 Apr 2008 00:05:40 PDT

On the outskirts of Shenzhen, up a small mountain and around a bend, is a Buddhist temple. At first glance, it looks like any other Buddhist temple-vibrant yellows and reds, wreaths of flowers celebrating the Chinese New Year, devotees with incense in hand, waiting to offer prayers to the temple's 12 different Buddhas. Even the on-site restaurant, in keeping with Buddhist tradition, is vegetarian. But lining the ground floor of the orange pagoda are gift shops (several of them) and illegal minibus drivers perch just outside, ready to ferry tired worshippers back down the hill to the city for a few cents a head.

It's the last few days of the Chinese Spring Festival, and under the bright sun, the ornate pavilion looks lost in time. The whole complex could date from the beginning of the last century-ancient in Shenzhen. Except it doesn't. It was built in 1990, which makes the 102-year-old head priest 84 years older than the temple he cares for.

"There are no old buildings in Shenzhen," explains a worshipper with a laugh.

In a city built on expectations and the promise of a new China, the temple is an oddity-a building made to look old. Here, gleaming skyscrapers are prized, shooting up into the sky with improbable speed to accommodate the hundreds of Chinese who show up every day to find work. And from an observation deck on the 68th floor of Shenzhen's tallest skyscraper, one can track the city's three-decade rise through its rapidly shifting architecture: dull concrete apartment blocks with oppressive metal window bars (early 1980s), low-rises covered in bathroom tiles (mid-1980s), Pepto-Bismol-pink silos (early to mid-1990s), Hong Kong meets Miami pastel (early 2000s), and large, curved-glass showpieces (post-2004). In all directions, cranes shift materials to brand-name condos and business towers designed by superstar architects. Nearby, a high-rise looms 40 stories in the air. It looks about a year old, but if you look closely, the brick is already starting to discolor. Beside that, a structure has been razed.

In 1979, Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping chose a sleepy Pearl River Delta fishing village about 20 miles from Hong Kong to be a "special economic zone," a testing ground for China's experiments in capitalism. In the nearly 30 years since, Shenzhen has exceeded all expectations. It has exploded from a population of 70,000 to at least 10 million. It has also become a high-tech business destination with a massive container port-the fourth largest in the world-and a stock exchange surpassed in China only by those in Hong Kong and Shanghai. But listen closely in the city's markets and one can hear migrants from Sichuan and Hunan worrying that their jobs won't cover their big-city rent; cabbies stopped at red lights discuss the feasibility of striking for better pay. Like any big city that promises a better life, challenges here abound.

A woman walks behind an advertisement for a new development in Shenzhen.

Every day, hundreds of migrants arrive at the Luohu train station. Situated above a five-floor flea market selling counterfeit goods, the station teems with chaos. Along its central courtyard, bordered by stands of gigantic bamboo, a group of young men in leather coats, designer jeans, and bootleg sneakers squat on small stone planters, their eyes fixed on the next crop of newcomers, cigarettes turned upward so that they burn slower. Every so often, one of them attempts to change money for a British couple, who heed their guidebook's advice and turn their backpacks to the front as they walk away. Just past the station, a sidewalk sex bazaar takes shape. For three blocks, tired-looking and dumpy middle-aged madams hawk "massagie."

Migrants sit on curbs across the boulevard from the Shangri-La Hotel. One man wears a threadbare herringbone suit and scuffed, pointy-toed black dress shoes. His clothes, dark tan, and hardened face all reveal a lifetime in China's impoverished, agrarian interior. If Shenzhen is China's New York City, then Luohu is its Ellis Island.

When Echo Yang first visited the area in 1983, she saw a vastly different place. "There was nothing there," she says. "It was just deserted. It was very undesirable." At the time, Luohu was the city's only district. By the time Yang graduated from college in Hunan province and returned to Shenzhen, in 1999, the city had ballooned-six districts instead of one, with the core shifting from gritty Luohu to the more cosmopolitan Futian. Now 29, Yang works in the Shenzhen High-Tech Industrial Park for Lenovo, the Hong Kong-based company that has acquired IBM's laptop division. IBM, where Yang began her career, is heavily invested in Shenzhen. It has located its world procurement headquarters at SHIP, joining foreign giants like Philips, Compaq, Olympus, Epson, Lucent, and Thomson. In 2005, exports from the park increased 23 percent-to $8.746 billion.

Yang embodies the city's new generation: College-educated and upwardly mobile, her heart is set on business school at Northwestern University. Yang is about five feet tall with a ready smile, short hair, and a quick laugh. In keeping with Chinese tradition, she lives at home with her parents, who have retired and joined her in Shenzhen.

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I have mixed feelings toward this city. A month ago, Shenzhen was elected China's most suitable city to live in. Rich people, they think this place is very good, but for common migrant workers, Shenzhen is probably the most undesirable city to live in.

Much of Shenzhen's charm reflects the city's lack of history and flair for pastiche. This is especially true of Yang's neighborhood, Overseas Chinese Town. It was designed by the Communist Party to attract Chinese investment from abroad. It features a theme park called Window of the World, which allows visitors to take in many of the world's landmarks-the Pyramids, the Eiffel Tower, and the leaning tower of Pisa-in about three hours. There is also a mock Swiss town called the Portofino, and the Galleon Restaurant and Bar, a full-sized ship perched on top of the InterContinental Hotel. On a warm February evening, the bar's band is blazing through their tight-panted rendition of Daddy Yankee's "Gasolina."

Spending a few days in OCT, with its cover bands, bootleg wonders of the world, and over-the-top theme bars, it's easy to see why Shenzhen is so often called a "desert of culture." But to Shenzheners like Marc Hum, who delights in charting new directions, the lack of artistic hierarchy here is liberating. "China is a country of long history, so it has some old and unchanged habits," explains Hum. "So if you're living in your hometown, you never review it. In Shenzhen, you have a chance to review those old traditions." For Hum, this means there are no hometown obligations. "This can make people's relationships simpler," he explains. In Shenzhen, Hum and his colleagues are living for themselves.

His firm, Hum Design, is housed in a former factory that would look at home in any worldwide design capital. Entering through the rounded cement doorway feels like stepping into a spaceship. There are high ceilings, stark white walls, and matching white epoxy-painted floors. Hum's 12 employees work at desks of repurposed metal or custom camphor wood from Hunan, Hum's home province. But like artists' districts all over the world, prices are rising here almost as quickly as its artists set up. Hum's studio, which overlooks faded body shops and car detailers, may soon be demolished. In New York, the transition from factories to lofts takes about a century; Hum's building was completed just 25 years ago. Should it be destroyed, Hum has a contingency plan: move the company to Overseas Chinese Town. "They wouldn't tear down OCT, right?" he reasons.

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Compared with Beijing, Shenzhen is less political, more freestyle. So that's why I prefer this city to other Chinese cities. I disagree with those people who say Shenzhen has no culture. Personally, I think it's bullshit.

Hum and his friends, though, still enjoy a modern, bohemian lifestyle. On a warm February day, he and his drummer friend Deng Fang catch up over coffee at a downtown Starbucks. Together, they are the picture of American hipsters-Hum with a stylish black bomber jacket and Prada-ish black shoes and Deng in black-rimmed glasses-discussing the pros and cons of postcollegiate life in China's metropolises.

"Compared with Beijing, here is less political," Deng says, their friend Alex Li translating for him. "More freestyle. So that's why I prefer this city to other Chinese cities. I disagree with those people who say Shenzhen has no culture. Personally, I think it's bullshit. Bullshit!" he repeats, peering down his glasses and smirking authoritatively, as if to mock high culture.

"This city's a new baby," he continues. "Even though its culture is not so distinguished, it's developing."

The next evening, after dancing to third-rate reggaeton and dining to a soundtrack of Lionel Richie and Rick Astley, Deng's band takes the stage. An ethnic Kazakh singer pairs plaintive dombra-led folk music with the band's sophisticated drum riffs and chord changes. The crowd is transfixed.

A family gets their picture taken in front of a billboard.

During the Cultural Revolution, the Communist Party enacted a household registration system called Hukou, which designated the province, city, and town where citizens could live. For farmers and enemies of the state exiled to the countryside, this meant a life consigned to rural poverty. Now, for the first time since the 1950s, Chinese are ostensibly free to live wherever they choose. But in Shenzhen, official residency is still restricted and mostly reserved for people with government or white-collar jobs sponsored by major corporations. For migrant, non-Hukou workers, this means no mobility and limited benefits. The lion's share of the people here travel between Shenzhen and their hometown just once a year, during the Spring Festival. They never go anywhere else.

At last official count, Shenzhen had 2 million Hukou households, and 6.5 million non-Hukou households. And though Hukou is still technically on the books, enforcement is virtually nonexistent, so it's hard to say how many people actually live here. At the end of 2006, the city officially contained 8.5 million permanent residents, though most would put that number at about 2 to 4 million higher-and growing fast.

Many of the uncounted men and women reside in the city's isolated industrial districts, Bao'an and Longgang. Visitors rarely go there since they're hard to reach via public transportation and the Special Economic Zone visa available at the Hong Kong border doesn't permit travel to the area. And a figurative border further separates these two districts from Shenzhen's four richer districts. Within Bao'an and Longgang, the minimum monthly wage is just $105, almost 15 percent lower than in Shenzhen's other districts. Meanwhile, the price for a round-trip taxi ride from there to Overseas Chinese Town is prohibitive: around $20, the equivalent of a week's wages for a laborer.

The area is prowled by packs of motorcycle bandits who reportedly mug migrant workers with startling regularity, knowing that the workers have little legal recourse. And as a high-tech boom has lifted Shenzhen's fortunes, life for the migrants has gotten worse. The central government recently passed tougher wage-protection laws, further squeezing low-cost manufacturers, and last November, hired goons stabbed a prominent labor activist named Huang Qingnan in broad daylight. Though his assailants were captured, Huang was left with an indentation in his calf and a pronounced limp.

Zhang Zhiru, a youthful looking 29-year-old former laborer and colleague of Huang, knows these struggles firsthand. He runs a worker's rights group in an industrial building in Bao'an, organizing laborers who often work for so-called "black factories"-unregistered manufacturers that are very difficult to regulate. Two incidents inspired Zhang to start a group called the Spring Breeze Labor Dispute Association: In the late 1990s, he watched bosses beat two workers to death; in 2001, after he injured his hand and was unable to work, his boss, an unregistered factory owner, declared bankruptcy and fled.

"When I first started this job, it was because of my own accident and my co-workers' [death]," Zhang explains. "I started it because of my dream. I would tell myself that every job involves some risk. No job can absolutely avoid any risk. We can try to cut the risk to a minimum by being very rational and reasonable when we negotiate with the factories."

Still, Zhang worries that as Shenzhen moves away from manufacturing and toward skilled technology jobs, the migrant workers who paved the way for the tech boom are being forgotten. "I have a lot of mixed feelings toward this city," he says. "A month ago, Shenzhen was elected China's most suitable city for living. When I read this news, I felt a little bit funny. Rich people, they think this place is very good, but for common migrant workers, this city is probably the most undesirable city to live in." He pauses for a second, and then adds, "Many migrant workers in Shenzhen had beautiful expectations when they came here, but the reality blew them down."

Shenzhen is best viewed from the 68th floor of the city's tallest skyscraper.

It isn't necessary to cross Shenzhen's internal border to see how the other half lives. One afternoon, Allan Chu, a friend of Echo Yang's, leads the way through a part of the central Futian district that is slated for demolition. There are limping feral dogs, young men selling bowls of lukewarm entrails, and gambling. Lots of gambling: cards, mah-jongg, and two pool tables set up along the main road surrounded by young hustlers. Around here, all the windows are barred and the buildings are so close together that no light gets in. Chu calls them "buildings shaking hands."He pauses to speak with a restaurant owner, who spends the equivalent of $300 per month to rent a fetid noodle stall. The man comes from a rural area of Guangdong province. His daughter, who couldn't be older than 10, works a wok nearby. When asked about the future, the man shrugs. "It doesn't matter what I think. They will knock down the buildings anyway."Two blocks away, a teenager is making noodles in front of a small, tidy restaurant. He whips around a lifeless ball of dough, stretching, pulling, and deftly shaping it into micro-thin noodles with his hands. He then deposits it in a bubbling pot of beef broth. The owner, his father, beams. "The only difference between me and the Han [who comprise more than 90 percent of Chinese citizens] is my hat," the proprietor explains, pointing at his white skullcap. He is from the Xinjiang autonomous region, where discrimination against Muslims is common. But in Shenzhen, he says, locals are excited about trying food from Xinjiang, a tasty novelty from an area they've never visited. If his restaurant shuts down, he'll just open up somewhere else. He likes Shenzhen, he says. It isn't cold like Xinjiang.Later that day, I get a glimpse of what might replace the slum. A short subway ride away, Shenzhen's brand-new civic center is fast becoming the center of town. It houses a branch of the local mega-chain Book City, a KFC, and a Starbucks, along with a record store, a concert theater, and the central library.

The main building looks like a gigantic handlebar moustache grafted out of pieces of interlocking yellow and red steel. Chu has a different take: "It looks like it's wings taking off and flying into the sky." As you walk underneath the moustache, and dizzily stare down into the building's banked glass walls, you can see the library and concert hall to the left and a glass children's museum to the right. The trail leads out toward a nearby mountain. Before one can get there, though, the trail ends abruptly. This is Shenzhen. There is always more to build.

The China Issue

GOOD — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 21:18:23 PDT

In just a few months, the Olympic flame will arrive in Beijing, signaling the start of the 29th Olympiad. Beyond medal counts and race results, we will be engulfed in news about China-from government-sponsored agitprop about rapid modernization to alarmist drumbeats about a growing military and potential economic disaster. Somewhere in between the propaganda and the hysteria will lie the truth.

If the United States is the last remaining superpower of the imperialist era, then China is rapidly becoming the first of the information age. When the world last found itself with two superpowers things didn't go so well; we're hoping these stories will contribute to a more rational dialogue this time around. China's deplorable record on human rights, political freedom, and the environment cannot lightly be cast aside, but it is sometimes necessary to look beyond it. Our two countries are inexorably linked, so let's find out who our Eastern neighbor really is.

The China Issue Features

We'll be adding new features to this list regularly through May.

Welcome to the O.C.

DANIEL BROOK visits the suburban anomaly of Orange County, China.

Strangers in a Strange Land

Forget Paris. This generation's expats are hightailing it to Beijing and Shanghai. GOOD gets acquainted with some of China's newest residents.

Moving Pictures

Chinese director JIA ZHANG KE ponders cinema's impact on modern China.

Ten Reasons Why China Matters To You

THOMAS P.M. BARNETT offers 10 reasons why our communist neighbor to the east could be our most valuable global ally. BONUS: What's Up With China? Everything you wanted to know, but were afraid to ask.

Remember Tibet?

Samdhong Rinpoche, the Tibetan prime minister, discusses freedom, resistance, and China. Interview by MATT SCHWARTZ.

The New China

ADAM MATTHEWS explores the metropolis of Shenzhen to see how China's experiments in capitalism are playing out.

What's Up With China? plus China FAQ

They're just like us! They go to Vegas, win Olympic medals, and like hip hop. Plus: A China FAQ featuring the nine men who control China and more.

Strangers in a Strange Land

GOOD — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 18:02:10 PDT

It's easy to feel outnumbered in a country of 1 billion people, especially for non-natives. But more and more foreigners are finding ways to make China feel like home.

Morgan Alexander Jones (MoJo)

age 26

Where did you move from?

Brooklyn, New York.

How long have you been in China?

Three and a half years.

What do you do?

My main job is as a radio host for a luxury lifestyle and jazz show called Soulfire. The entire show is in Mandarin Chinese. My other main job is as a hip hop MC. I do my own solo work traveling around the country, hosting, rapping, and beatboxing for hip hop programs around China. But my big project right now is with my group Redstar. Redstar is a hip hop trio consisting of a Chinese-American producer by the name of DJ Sickstar, local Shanghainese rapper Tang King, and yours truly. We've been working together for about two years and we're finally coming out with our first album sometime this summer. It will change hip hop.

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There are a lot of black people in this country now ... and they speak Chinese, too.

Any funny stories?

A Chinese girl was walking past me and muttered a strangely straightforward phrase in Chinese: "Wow, there are a lot of black people in this country now." So I turned around and yelled back to her "Yeah, there are a lot of black people in this country now ... and they speak Chinese, too."

What do you miss most?

I miss buying deodorant for cheap. Deodorant out here is like seven or eight bucks a pop.

How much do you hang out with other expats?

Half and half. I don't really count. I think I'm mostly around Chinese people. I guess part of that is because I'm married to one. But then again, I think my wife is more American than me and I'm more Chinese than my wife. Go figure.

Any plans to come back?

I do plan on coming back. But I don't think it will be permanent, or at least not yet.

Sherry Smith

age 28

Where did you move from?

Before Shanghai, I lived in Wuhan, China. Before that, I lived in Jackson, Mississippi.

How long have you been in China?

Two and a half years.

What do you do and how did you end up doing it?

I work at a Microsoft joint venture with the Shanghai municipal government. (Trust me, it just sounds fancy.) My title is quality support specialist. When I worked in Wuhan, I taught maritime English to Chinese sailors.

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I moved to China to earn less than someone living below the poverty level in the U.S.

Why did you move?

I wanted to get out of Mississippi, and China is on the other side of the world ... literally. I said to myself, "I'm too smart to be paid by the hour." So I moved to China to earn less than someone living below the poverty level in the U.S.

What should people in America know about China?

Americans aren't the only ones who are fiercely patriotic. And the number of people learning English in China is larger than the entire population of the United States. Learn Chinese.

What do you miss most?

I miss my bra collection! I had 79, but my friends only let me bring 14.

Any plans to come back?

I don't know when I'll move back for good. I haven't been home since I left in 2005. I'm curious to see how much I've changed.

Mike Mou

age 28

Where did you move from?

New York.

How long have you been in China?

Five years.

What do you do in China?

I'm now working as a senior brand manager for an up-and-coming streetwear label called Eno. We are building stores across Mainland China focusing on urban Chinese youth, one of the most fascinating and fastest-growing groups in China. The learning curve is fast and the challenge to create a cool Chinese brand is something that's great to be a part of.

Why did you move to China?

I've been coming to China since I was a teenager. On my first trip to China, I visited a remote village on the Yangtze River. This was 10 years ago, and there were not as many foreigners here as there are now. I was acting as a translator between the local and tourist groups and it was a great feeling, being this cultural bridge between two worlds. My love just grew from there. Fast forward to 2003, the hype of China's growth and development really attracted me here, from a career standpoint. Also, my ability to speak Chinese and bicultural background couldn't really be leveraged in the U.S. China is a huge, relatively untapped market and developing faster than most Westerners can imagine.

Anything else to say?

You can't study animals at the zoo; you gotta come to the jungle.

Dan Washburn

age 34

Where did you move from?

Gainesville, Georgia-about 45 minutes northeast of Atlanta-where I was a sportswriter for a daily newspaper called The Times.

How long have you been in China?

Since August, 2002.

What do you do and how did you end up doing it?

Like seemingly every other foreigner you'll meet here, I am a freelance writer. I'm working on a book-Par for China, an insider look at golf in China. I'm also managing editor of Shanghaiist, a blog that has grown to become one of the most popular English-language websites about China since I founded it in the summer of 2005. I also help run an online store-Mudan Boutique-that offers locally designed jewelry, clothing, handbags, and other gift items.

Why did you move?

Four years in the Bible Belt were enough for me. I ended up in Shanghai not because it was tops on my list-I didn't even have a list-but because it was the scenario that materialized the quickest.

How much Chinese do you speak?

Enough, but definitely not as much as I'd like. If fluency is your goal, I think you really need to quit your job and dedicate a chunk of time to being a full-time student of Chinese.

Quote:

If fluency is your goal, you really need to quit your job and dedicate a chunk of time to being a full-time student of Chinese.

How much do you hang out with other expats?

Quite often-they are everywhere in Shanghai now. Really, there's been a dramatic increase in the number of foreign faces you see on the streets in just the short period of time I've lived here.

Any plans to come back?

You sound like my mom. My wife and I have a standard response when people ask us how long we plan on staying here: indefinitely, but not permanently.

John Sorrell

age 27

Where did you move from?

Franklin, Ohio.

How long have you been in China?

Five years.

What do you do?

Right now I am a youth pastor for expats.

Why did you move?

After I graduated college, I had lived 21 years in Ohio. I wanted to get out and live somewhere different. So the other side of the world was a perfect fit.

How much Chinese do you speak?

I would consider myself conversational, but my conversations just remain very short.

How much do you hang out with other expats?

It's not exactly legal to do what I do with Chinese students. So I work exclusively with expats, because in that field I am fully legal in my role.

Any interesting stories?

We have adopted several phrases to help us cope during those times that you just can't understand why China is the way it is. My favorite is "China wins again." This is used for when something happens that you just can't change. Right now China's up 1 million to zero.

What should people in America know about China?

We can learn a lot from the level at which they revere an education. I would never wish the Chinese student life upon anyone (way too much pressure and stress) but I respect the ones who make it through.

Any plans to come back?

Not for a while. Youth pastors and youth leaders are all over the States, but here they are few and far between. There are thousands of expat kids all over Asia who want mentors, pastors, and leaders.

Lisa Movius

age 31

Where did you move from?

Ann Arbor, San Diego, Providence, and San Francisco.

How long have you been in China?

I first studied in Beijing in 1997, and moved to Shanghai permanently in 1998.

What do you do and how did you end up doing it?

I'm a freelance writer. I first started writing while doing other jobs here as I discovered there was a lot of amazing alternative cultural activity in Shanghai that was being overlooked by both the Mandarin- and English-language press here.

Why did you move?

I finished college, needed somewhere to go, and picked the most familiar place.

How much Chinese do you speak?

What is this "Chinese" you speak of? I am fluent in spoken Mandarin, I understand Shanghainese, but can only speak a little of it, although am learning. I have picked up a little Cantonese, can sometimes follow it, but it's minimal. How's your European?

How much do you hang out with other expats?

I have almost zero interaction with expats. They live in their

high-walled wealthy suburban ghettos, I live in China; the two rarely interact.

What do you miss?

I miss good tacos and falafel, but have learned to make them. Uncensored bookstores. And clean air.

Any plans to come back?

I have spent a third of my life, my entire adulthood in China. It is my home. There is no "back" for me.

Jon Lombardo

age 27

Where did you move from?

I was living and working in New York City before I moved to Nanjing in August 2004. I moved to Shanghai-where I now live-in April 2005.

How long have you been in China?

A little more than three years.

What do you do and how did you end up doing it?

I currently work for a consumer-finance company named China Risk Finance. We are trying to become the Chinese equivalent of Capital One. I am director of internet strategy. I am in charge of the unit that markets credit cards online. Since I joined, we have grown the company from 25 to almost 1,100 employees.

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All the Chinese gents at my gym meticulously and publicly blow-dry their pubic hair.

Why did you move?

I studied in China during my junior year of college and I was fascinated by the energy and opportunity available to young professionals here. At that point I knew that I would probably need to return to China.

Any funny stories?

All the Chinese gents at my gym meticulously and publicly blow-dry their pubic hair. I have honestly not been witness to that anywhere else.

What should people in America know about China?

Whenever people hype China, remember that China is still two-thirds farmers. That means there are roughly 800 million farmers here. That is the real China. Even I don't go to those places.

Any plans to come back?

I am definitely looking forward to getting back to the U.S. I am pretty sure that I can learn to love eating shitty Chinese food again.

Remember Tibet?

Matt Schwartz — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 16:55:59 PDT

The efforts of Tibet's government-in-exile-led by Prime Minister Samdhong Rinpoche and Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama-will be remembered as a persistent thorn in the side of Communist China. When the Dalai Lama fled Tibet in 1959, after eight years of harsh Chinese occupation and a failed uprising, there wasn't much to distinguish his people from the countless other ethnic groups whose national aspirations have been steamrolled into oblivion. But today, the Free Tibet movement is a visible cause célèbre-and has been for a decade. Having won a Nobel Peace Prize and a Congressional Gold Medal-the highest civilian honor in the United States-the Dalai Lama is one of the West's most beloved (and bestselling) spiritual advisers.

This is little comfort to the 6 million Tibetan Buddhists still living under the repressive regime of the People's Republic of China. Since taking control of Tibet in 1951, the PRC has killed hundreds of thousands of Tibetan Buddhists (in a conservative estimate), destroyed thousands of temples and monasteries, and continued to punish open support of the Dalai Lama with imprisonment and torture. Each year, thousands more Tibetans join their fellow exiles in Dharamsala, a town in the hills of northern India where the Tibetan government-in-exile provides education, social services, and a home for its more than 20,000 refugees.

After decades of working alongside the Dalai Lama, Rinpoche, a 69-year-old scholar and monk, was elected prime minister of the Kashag (the Tibetan parliament) in 2001. He has helped parlay the international community's sympathy into active negotiations with China for a partially autonomous Tibet. Faced with the possibility that the PRC is only humoring Tibetan demands while waiting for the Dalai Lama to die, Rinpoche has also laid the groundwork for a permanent government in exile, where future Dalai Lamas would be ceremonial monarchs and political power would reside with elected officials. In our conversation a few months before the Beijing Olympics, Rinpoche discussed how he keeps the idea of Tibetan independence alive in a China-friendly world: compromise, nonviolence, and above all, patience.

GOOD: How would you describe the current relationship between Tibet and China?

SAMDHONG RINPOCHE: It's neither a good relationship nor a bad relationship. Since 2002 there have been six rounds of dialog between His Holiness the Dalai Lama and his PRC counterparts. But there has not been much breakthrough on the substantial issues. On the contrary, repressive measures inside Tibet have very much increased since 2006. There is great angst, great tension inside Tibet. The PRC has been cutting down on the freedom of speech and the freedom of movement. All religions must be in complement with the Communist Party line. The campaign against His Holiness [the Dalai Lama] has increased as well. They say that he is trying to break the motherland, that he's a separatist and split-ist. People are not happy inside of Tibet.

What is the status of the talks between you and the PRC?

The seventh was supposed to happen in December and January, but it hasn't happened yet. We await their call.

What do you and the PRC disagree on?

First is the perception of history. The PRC asks us to accept that Tibet has historically been a part of China, since before 1951. That is not true. History is history; what happened, happened. The other major disagreement is autonomy for all the 6 million Tibetans. The so-called Tibet autonomous region contains less than one-third of the Tibetan population, and it divides them into 11 districts. We ask for unification of the entire Tibetan people within one autonomous agency. That is not agreeable [for the PRC]. If these two disagreements could be resolved, the others could reach a compromise.

Do you feel frustrated?

No. This is a national issue. For an individual's life, 50 years is a long time. But for a life of nation, 50 years is not. So we are not frustrated. We continue to make our effort.

Have you considered the possibility that you may not live to see an autonomous Tibet?

It is not important. If it is not achieved in our life, the next generation will carry on the struggle. Maybe for a hundred years, two hundred years, whatever it may take. The people will achieve autonomy sooner or later, because China is changing very rapidly and China cannot remain as it is today.

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"China is not modern. Modernization means democratization. It means respect for human rights and an open society with individual rights. None of these are available in China.

Is the modernization of China helping your cause?

China is not modern. Modernization means democratization. It means respect for human rights and an open society with individual rights. None of these are available in China. They have only the market, the consumeristic economic system. Apart from that, it is all in the Middle Ages.

What about those economic changes-how will they help the Tibetans?

Uneven economic growth means many people become very rich and lots of people become poor. The gap between the haves and the have-nots has increased very rapidly. With economic growth like this, democratization will follow naturally. Slowly they have to open up. As the people become more exposed to the free world, the democracy movement inside China will grow.

What is the significance of the Beijing Olympics for China and Tibet?

We wish that these games be successfully conducted. At the same time, we wish that a large number of free countries will participate in these games, and that that will have some kind of positive effect on the Chinese government for more transparency and more individual freedom. If these games could bring these changes, then I think they are a boon. Apart from that, there are many pro-Tibet groups and individuals who think this is an opportunity to pressure China. We do not agree with that. We are looking more to the post-Olympic era.

But might there be ways to make your cause visible during the Olympics?

The Olympic Games are a playful occasion. To disturb them is not a good gesture. All the international parties are willingly gathered there. If they have any resentment about the Chinese human-rights situation, or China having no rule of law, then these free countries should not participate. It is their choice. I was very much surprised to hear recently that the Olympic committees of some European nations have instructed their players not to wear any slogans on their shirts during the games.

Some of the athletes wore shirts that said "Free Tibet."

Yes. I understand they were told that "Free Tibet" should not be there. That is okay. But to prohibit any kind of slogan, any kind of quotation? I don't know why the Western nations are so eager to appease China. It is very strange.

What do you think their reasoning is?

The multinational companies find it easier to do business in China than in any free country. If you look at the workers of India and China, there is not much difference. But people are not willing to invest in India because it has rule of law, it has free trade, it has a free judiciary; there are a lot of labor unions. In China there is no rule of law, no free trade, no judiciary. If these companies bribe one party member and one military commander, they can work their laborers 24 hours a day, seven days a week. That is why all the production in China is so cheap compared to every other country. It is the exploitation of labor and natural raw materials. So capital investors are very happy with the China situation, and they try to protect it.

The Dalai Lama has suggested that if he is reincarnated at all, he will not be born inside China.

Yes. His Holiness very much hopes that during his lifetime the Tibet issue may be resolved. Then he would be able to go back to Tibet as a religious leader and his next reincarnation could be chosen in accordance with traditional religious practices. But in case he should die in exile … the Dalai Lama has made clear that if he dies outside of Tibet then he will not be reborn in an occupied area. He will be reborn in a free country, outside of Tibet. It is the responsibility of the Tibetans in exile to find the next reincarnation. China will interfere with this but we are not afraid. We will make a foolproof plan to find the next Dalai Lama. We are, at this moment, seriously deliberating on this issue.

As you negotiate with the PRC, do the pragmatic necessities of diplomacy ever come into conflict with your religious views?

No, because we do not adopt any so-called strategy. We are having dialogue with the PRC without any diplomacy. We say what we think in very straightforward language. There's no compromise.

Looking back on Tibet's history, it seems younger generations might believe that political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. How do you convince them not to use force?

There is a kind of seed of nonviolence in the blood of the Tibetan people. In our education system, nonviolence is interwoven with all other subjects. Therefore we think the younger generation will not resort to violence in the foreseeable future. In the 21st century there is no place for violence. Only nonviolence is the solution to any problem, even if you look at it pragmatically, without any spirituality. If violence is chosen as the method, then no problem is ever solved, because there is no end. We need dialogue, or the entire world will be destroyed.

Welcome to the O.C.

Daniel Brook — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 16:18:13 PDT

A guard wearing a one-size-too-big military uniform salutes my driver through the gate at the grand entrance to Orange County. Suddenly we're transported from China to, well, somewhere else. Where, exactly, is hard to say. It would be strange enough if Orange County, this gated community near the Beijing airport, were the straight-up replica of Southern California it claims to be. But it is stranger than that. The development, 45 minutes up the freeway from Beijing's better-known Forbidden City, has the appearance of a Disney theme park where someone mixed up all the different sections-a smidgen of Epcot's faux Paris intermingled with Main Street U.S.A.'s Americana.

At Orange County, California-style ranch houses sit alongside English Tudors and a French-style formal garden complete with stately fountains (turned off for the winter). The street signs of weathered wood held together with rusty spikes conjure the Old West of Durango while the community clubhouse, called the Rive Gauche Town Center, has a mansard roof typical of a French country estate. The totem poles inside recall the Pacific Northwest and the fireplace mantlepiece is carved in the shape of English-language books, including Hamlet, Macbeth, and the erroneously titled Moby-Dock. So far from the West, the distinctions between France and America, let alone Colorado and California, get lost. (The Chinese would surely have a similar laugh at our expense for the popularity of "pan-Asian" restaurants Stateside.)

I requested a Sunday tour, hoping that people would be enjoying the one-day Chinese weekend in their yards. But here in Orange County, China, just days after Christmas, it is not exactly rollerblading weather. The fake lake is frozen solid. A brave, bundled-up grandmother takes a baby carriage out for stroll. But for most, weekend fresh air is what you get when you walk from your home to your SUV.

Though distinctly lacking in warm California sun, Orange County's promotional brochures tout it as "flown over fresh to Beijing," and even "pure American." And there is at least some truth in advertising. The project, whose 143-unit first phase opened in 2001 at a ceremony including American diplomats and McDonald's cheeseburgers, was designed by a trio of design firms from California's Orange County, headed by Bassenian Lagoni Architects, a leading designer of McMansions that has been dubbed one of the most influential architects you've never heard of by The Wall Street Journal.

China's version of Orange County has sold all 143 of its first-phase units.

The idea for building a piece of the California Dream on the Wenyu River was born in the real California in the late 1990s. A Chinese developer named Zhang Bo was tooling around Orange County when he got that "if you build it, they will come" feeling-real estate-developer's intuition. He and a friend decided to go into business together and their company, SinoCEA-a fifty-fifty joint venture with China's one-party state-got to work. Peasants were shipped in from the Chinese hinterlands to build modern homes with the medieval construction techniques of the country's manual-labor force. And though construction is now complete, during my visit, a crew is at work, renovating the clubhouse pool. Pushing wheelbarrows and wielding pickaxes in this Disneyfied landscape, they conjured up nothing so much as the Seven Dwarves.

But just as Disney's feel-good films have their curmudgeonly critics, so too does Orange County. Bassenian Lagoni's marketing director actually tried to prevent me from seeing the development at all, offering a litany of excuses that culminated in a claim of a "gag order" by a client. (Said client later arranged my tour.) But the architect's media-shyness is not surprising given the sneering coverage the development has received; Even the hometown paper, The Orange County Register, criticized the development for "[replicating] Orange County's class distinctions." Hardly hometown boosterism. In fact, an entire cottage industry has sprung up in academia to tar the development with the latest post-modern jargon. A graduate student at the University of California, Irvine, accuses the development of aiming to "simulate a simulacra"-copy a copy-while a German urban-studies professor dubs Orange County, China, the "genius loci of suburbia in the age of global capitalism."

Other critics, with far bigger megaphones, see the development as emblematic of China's burgeoning car culture and its wholehearted embrace of environmentally destructive growth. The journalist Ted Conover tsk-tsked in The New York Times that while China rushes to build "new gated communities, new themed enclaves, all for the car-owning class, [what is] conspicuously missing [is] a corresponding investment in mass transit, in public spaces, and public access." As China industrializes, many fear that the country is making the same environmental mistakes the United States made a century ago, worrying that the planet cannot sustain such an onslaught from its most populous nation.

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When I heard that houses in Orange County go for up to $2 million, I imagined residents who had seen so many Hollywood movies that they were willing to shell out serious yuan to live in one-a kind of intentional Truman Show.

When the original suburbs of Southern California were designed after World War II, they aimed to combine the feel of suburbs like Levittown, on Long Island, with a style befitting the milder climate. The solution took inspiration from the building traditions of the Mediterranean and-voilà!-California's stucco-and-red-tile-roof ranch house was born. Expressways, shopping malls, and country clubs-and the consumer lifestyle that went with them-were part and parcel of this new "little boxes on the hillside" layout.

Combining Long Island with Tuscany was strange enough, but airlifting the whole thing to the cold climes of Beijing defies even the tenuous internal logic of the original plan. Groping to make sense of the senseless, one Western academic chalked up Orange County, China, to a traditional Chinese culture that places little emphasis on originality and no stigma on copying. If you can get a bootleg box set of the The O.C. on the streets of Beijing, why shouldn't you be able to live in a bootleg copy of the O.C., too?

Southern California's leading export is images of itself, so it's no surprise that the "California lifestyle" has become a typical aspiration for China's growing class of dollar-millionaires. When I heard that houses in Orange County go for somewhere between $250,000 and $2 million, I imagined residents who had seen so many Hollywood movies that they were willing to shell out serious yuan to live in one-a kind of intentional Truman Show. Once here, however, I discover that many of the residents, unlike their poorer countrymen, have firsthand knowledge of the real California. Indeed, bringing the style of a major city of the Chinese diaspora-like Los Angeles-back to China underlies much of the suburban style development surrounding Beijing. Just down the road from Orange County is Vancouver Forest, a gated community planted with evergreen trees and teeming with ethnic Chinese-just like the real Vancouver, albeit lacking in the dramatic British Columbia topography, just as Orange County is lacking in Southern California weather.

Ma Junhai, an Orange County resident who showed me around his home, was for many years part of that Chinese diaspora. A gracious, semiretired gentleman in a blue cardigan, he has the kindly look of a Chinese Mr. Rogers. Fluent in French, English, and Mandarin, he fit in perfectly with the hodgepodge architecture. And despite being an Orange County homeowner, he's more of a Northern California kind of guy. After doing graduate work at Stanford, Ma worked as a communications executive for Sun Microsystems, first in Silicon Valley and then in Beijing. Living in the San Francisco suburbs in the 1990s, he developed a taste for what the Chinese call villas-single-family houses. When he returned to China, he settled first in an apartment in downtown Beijing but in 2004, he sought the suburban virtues that the city lacks: "Beautiful fresh air. Good neighbors. And very quiet," he says. That year he bought his second home-a weekend villa in Orange County.

Ma's house resembles that of a prosperous Chinese immigrant in California, with a rice cooker and wok in the kitchen alongside a box of Betty Crocker blueberry muffin mix. The plots in this Orange County are smaller than their counterparts in the California one-a natural result of the government's one-child policy. And besides the master bedroom and a single child's room, Orange County homes include bedrooms for elderly parents and a tiny room, about the size of a walk-in closet, for a maid.

Off his back patio, Ma has planted bamboo. Necessary for good feng shui, it will bring "happiness and good luck," he says. The fountain in the patio, which doesn't dribble water in colder months, is in the Tuscan style. But despite the Western design, Ma assures me it will serve its auspicious purpose of bringing prosperity. The running water is "like cash flow," he says.

Tokens of Ma's wealth and jetsetter status dot his home. In the basement, he points out souvenirs he's picked up on his travels and a framed picture of himself with Sun Microsystems chairman and cofounder Scott McNealy. Upstairs, in his son's room, he gestures at a sheepskin rug on the floor. "That's from Northern Chile," he offers, turning it over to reveal a label that reads "AAA Export Quality, Southeast Australia." "Oh, right," he says. "I got that one in Australia."

For China's new rich, the lifestyle they often aspire to-a villa, a lawn, and a car-has an impact far beyond China itself. "Cars are associated with higher social status and achievement-and freedom," explains Hongyan He Oliver, a research fellow at Harvard's Energy Technology Innovation Policy research group. In a society where people have little capacity to define themselves in more meaningful ways-forbidden from voicing dissident political opinions, barred from choosing a religion apart from the five officially sanctioned ones, prohibited from even deciding how many children to have-consumer choice takes on inordinate meaning. But should China's poorer billion people actually take this to the Southern California extreme, we're all in trouble. The greenhouse gas from the car exhaust alone could push the planet to the brink, to say nothing of the waste from use-it-once-and-throw-it-away consumption and the energy used to heat and cool hundreds of millions of single-family homes in the too-hot-and-too-cold climate of much of the country. If Orange County is to be typical of development in the new China, it would seem that the world's most populous country is hurtling toward a dystopian future-and taking the rest of the planet with it.

Though power plants and factories are still the main source of Chinese environmental destruction, car exhaust is now the main contributor to smog in Beijing. And despite regulations like heavy registration fees and a cap on new registrations per year in Shanghai, China adds 14,000 new cars a day.

Still, it appears that the hysterical tone of so much of the coverage-"China Crisis!" "Threat to the Global Environment!" "Choking on Growth!"-is a case of the pot calling the kettle black. One can't imagine, for example, a Shanghai-style cap on new car registrations being approved by the Los Angeles City Council anytime soon. Moreover, Americans like to assume that as countries develop, their masses automatically yearn for cars and lawns. But Parisians live in apartments; when Dutch people make it big, they buy a souped-up bike; Japan's business executives zip off to meetings by carbon-sensitive bullet train, not an emission-spewing Learjet. Which way China will develop is still an open question. On the one hand, car ownership has become a major status symbol. On the other, as of now, Harvard's Oliver notes, "the most commonly seen residential development is several-story-high buildings on newly urbanized land," which are invariably served by a bus route if not a subway line. In short, it's a far cry from Southern California.

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Rather than scold the Chinese, Americans would do better to rethink and redesign our own sprawling cities.

Contemporary urban planning for China's major cities can be described as an "and the kitchen sink" strategy. From an environmental perspective, China is essentially doing all the wrong things and all the right things at the same time. The cities are growing so rapidly that the authorities are giving it everything they've got, planning for sprawl and smart growth simultaneously. For example, the Chinese government is building a highway system to rival America's, but it is also building a subway system in Shanghai that will be bigger than New York's. China opens a new coal-fired power plant every week, but is also investing heavily in alternative energies like solar power. Beijing even has sustainable building requirements for new construction, though whether they are enforced is doubtful. But ultimately, urban density and good planning are the main reasons why the average resident of compact Tokyo uses as much energy in a week as the average resident of sprawling Houston uses in a day.

To Sidney Wong, a city planning professor who teaches at Morgan State University, in Baltimore, and the University of Pennsylvania, this strategy of building everything at once makes sense. "For national economic development, building an interstate system is a must," he says, adding that it won't be the environmental catastrophe some fear "as long as they upgrade and strengthen the rail system." The central government, he says, should provide better incentives for cities to build subway systems which he believes many cities would build if assured by the powers that be in Beijing that they can afford them.

To the extent that car culture is growing in China-Beijing went from 1.6 million to 2.6 million cars in just five years-it is as much a function of the stick as the carrot. Pedestrians and bikers grossly outnumber drivers, and in many Chinese cities, it's like a Critical Mass bike rally every day. But as more people shift from bikes to cars, the math is changing. And rather than making its cities more bike- and pedestrian-friendly, China is going in the opposite direction. Beijing is now encircled, like Houston, by several beltways of elevated highways and Shanghai has, unfathomably, removed bike lanes from its major streets at the very time many cities in the West, realizing that sprawl is unsustainable, are adding them. Ironically, Orange County, with its meandering sidewalks and speed bumps, is the most pedestrian-friendly neighborhood in the area.

The road leading to Orange County, lined with car dealerships and gas stations, signals of the burgeoning Chinese car culture. Still, for all his love of the O.C., Ma Junhai plans to keep an apartment downtown. His business interests are there and so are many of his friends; the notion of commuting for two hours on the freeway each day-utterly mundane in Southern California-would be considered slightly insane here.

So even though Orange County, China, is billed in one brochure as "100 percent American," it is not 100 percent sprawl, as its California counterpart is. With small plots, one-car garages, and sidewalks throughout, the development is significantly denser. Still, it's the kind of place where you can't get the proverbial quart of milk-or bag of tea?-without taking the car out for a spin.

Ironically, Beijing's wealthy are buying cars and fleeing to suburbs like Orange County to escape the ever-worsening traffic downtown. In a way, the developments that have begun to encircle major cities fit into what the author and activist Naomi Klein calls "suburban Green Zones," viewing Baghdad's fortified island of functionality as a model of hellish 21st-century urban development. Klein's description of "armored suburbs … patrolled by private militias" would certainly apply to Orange County, where the security forces march en masse through the streets of the development. At Rose and Ginkgo, a new Beijing development also designed by Southern California architects, the guard at the Mediterranean-style main gate wears a jet-black version of a People's Liberation Army uniform, a Soviet-inspired ensemble topped by a Russian fur hat. But his ID tag reads "Longhu," the name of the development company, creating a perfect gulag-archipelago-meets-consumer-capitalism symbol of the new China.

It's not entirely clear who exactly poses such a threat to these gated communities that so much security is needed. Maybe it is pure paranoia, but it is the paranoia that comes from being conspicuously so much wealthier than one's fellowBeijingers. From an environmental perspective, perhaps the fact that Orange County is so atypical of Chinese urban development is its saving grace.

China's new prosperity and the lifestyle it allows is what brought Ma Junhai back home. But if anything, he is living a more environmentally sensitive life with a smaller carbon footprint here in China than he was in California as a Silicon Valley commuter. Rather than scold the Chinese, Americans would do better to rethink and redesign our own sprawling cities. If the Chinese are set on emulating us, we might as well give them something worth emulating.

In Orange County, when I ask a resident, Tong Xiaobo, about the appeal of the development, he explains that the American lifestyle represents health and freedom. What about it, exactly, is healthy, I ask. In America, after all, we associate suburban sprawl with the sedentary lifestyle that has led to our national obesity epidemic. The healthy aspect of the design that stood out, Tong explains, was having a bathroom next to the bedroom. Traditional Chinese homes have only one bathroom, shared by all the residents. Orange County's homes boast lavish bathrooms adjoining the master bedroom complete with his-and-hers sinks and a Jacuzzi. Tong extolled the additional bathroom as "an innovation in construction and design [that] represents modern health." He then lit up a cigarette. Having explained what he meant by "health," I pressed him to explain what he meant by "freedom." He simply ignored the question.