For the Chinese, A House is Much More than a Home

Opinion Editorial by Michael Wu

House in Vancouver Forest, Beijing, China. House in Ju Jun (Orange County), Beijing, China.

Imagine stepping out the doors of Beijing Capital International Airport, the thick, musty air hitting your face. You get into a cab and head onto the S-28 freeway, where drivers switch lanes without notice and honk incessantly. You doze off. 45 minutes later, you open your eyes, and you see stucco and stone-clad tan houses as well as red-roof shingles with a Spanish flair. It instantly reminds you of the place you just flew from - southern California - and you think: wait, did I forget to board the plane?

But you didn’t. You’re still in Beijing, only it’s not Chinese architecture. No upwardly-curved roofs or stone lions in sight, only Californian houses. What is going on?

Ju Jun, which, in Chinese, literally translates as “Orange County”, is only one of a handful of gated, high-priced suburban communities that have sprung up on the outskirts of Beijing. Basically, it takes the Spanish, southern Californian style architecture and transplants it to the Beijing suburbs, with the caveat that the houses are slightly more compact, the lots are smaller, and in the center of the community, a Chinese flag ripples in the wind, its five golden stars gloriously sitting atop the red. Each house is being sold for millions of yuan, but that hasn’t stopped the Chinese rich from snatching up the houses. Although, originally the houses were built for expatriates and foreign heads of local branches of international companies, the majority of inhabitants are inarguably Chinese.

This trend of building suburban communities with distinct flairs is a booming craze in China. About ten minutes down the road from Ju Jun is Napa Valley, where the Mediterranean-style, stucco and wood houses, ostensibly of northern California, have made their mark. Down the road again is Vancouver Forest, which Canadian media has even heralded as a great representation of Canadian living, enticing the returning overseas Chinese who have lived in that

Canadian city. Even further down the road are an Australian development and another community recreating the French Baroque and neo-classical style. The list goes on and on, and by no means is this limited to the Chinese capital; Shanghai, among other large Chinese cities, is experiencing the same phenomenon. One might think that these houses are just for show and become “mosquito museums” (i.e., buildings that, due to being uninhabited, become showcases for mosquitoes). But no, they sell out, and fast too; for instance, all 143 units of Ju Jun were snatched up within the first month of going on sale based on floor plans alone. If that is not an indication of a thirst for these houses, nothing is.

This all sounds eerily familiar. Remember the latter half of the 20th century in America? For those of us too young to live through much of this era, myself included, history teaches us, among other things: that man landed on the moon, and that middle-class and wealthy Americans flocked out of the cities into serene and detached dwellings that looked nearly identical to one another. As time went on, the houses began to vary more until we have the American suburbs of today. Superficially, this phenomenon in China mirrors that development. First, people sought to live farther away from the city, and increasingly chose not to live in high-rises. This led to housing communities that were designed with simplicity and efficiency in mind over style, not unlike the mountain communities that can be found throughout Taiwan (as a side note, the transplantation of foreign styles into houses hasn’t really caught up in Taiwan). As China’s elite burgeoned, they began seeking the comfort that they perceived Americans enjoyed, and that they themselves often enjoyed as they worked abroad.

Thus, developers built communities that traced antique, luxury, and historical origins from other parts of the world. They attempt to serve up to these Chinese consumers a palatable array of elegance, sophistication, and status by fulfilling the four ideological aspects that initially drew people to suburbia, as Graeme Davison of Monash University, in Australia, writes in a recent issue of the Journal of Urban History (Jaffe, 2013): evangelism, sanitarianism, romanticism, and class segregation. Evangelism refers to a distancing from civic moral corruption in a Christian sense, while sanitarianism involves distancing oneself from rancid and crowded city conditions. Romanticism champions the beauty and desirability of detached homes and private gardens, and lastly, class segregation perpetuates a status statement through physical separation of the rich and the poor. Evangelism arguably plays a lesser role in China, but the other three seem to be what the Chinese are embodying. Most want a haven far away from the raucousness and smog of the city. Most appreciate the luxurious architecture that these suburban homes provide. But most importantly, it seems most Chinese desire to make a status statement: we are the haves in this new, market-socialist China. Despite not being able to express ourselves fully in politics and religion, we will impress others the only way we know how: material luxuries and economic status.

The catch is the fervency of the motivation behind this chase for luxury housing because it underlines the difference between China’s current suburbia and America’s suburban past. As much as the Chinese real estate is a déjà vu of American historical housing trends, the Chinese

view this materialistic chase from a different perspective. Public, not private, consumption is the focus. In a statement made by Tom Doctoroff, author of What Chinese Want: Culture, Communism and China's Modern Consumer, the most popular mobile phone brands are international, while home electrical appliances are cheap, local ones. In other words, the brands that can be seen in public matter, while the ones that cannot be seen in public do not. This applies in terms of housing, too. The Chinese are concerned with the comfort and status that living in luxurious houses conveys to others, not for the luxury and comfort itself. Granted, some of them choose these houses to reminisce about their days in the U.S., others may want to live out the type of life they had only viewed in American drama series. We can’t generalize for everybody. However, the materialistic craze in China is indeed off the charts. According to a recent study, Chinese people make up 15% of luxury sales in Paris, but only 2% of shoppers (Doctoroff, 2012). And it’s not simply because these things look pretty. People buy houses, cars, jewelry, and watches – any luxury commodity they can afford in order to show off their status. This materialistic mindset resembles the post-World War II consumerism boom in America – only decades later and with a hugely different mindset. The humongous Chinese market is willing to swallow up all products that come its way as long as it means assimilating into a regiment of a modern middle or upper class. In short, it is not about expressing individual wealth for the sake of individualism, it is about showing wealth in a relativistic sense as benchmarks for social mobility. For example, you will see people buying these exotically-designed houses because they are within a community of other similar-looking houses, and buying Audis and BMWs instead of Maserati’s (Doctoroff, 2012). It’s all about standing out while fitting in, being part of the elite but not being overtly flashy.

This, then, is how consumerism in China differs from how it used to be (and sometimes still is) in America. Consumerism had been marketed as an economic stimulus after the war, and the new suburban homes and items were marketed as commodities for “self-expression” rather than with an externally-beneficial goal in mind. In China, things get sold by exalting the external benefits. Beauty products help a woman “move forward,” a car helps a man “move up in the world” (Doctoroff, 2012). For the Chinese people, it’s not about feelings, it’s about how others perceive their status – and this drive to be seen as significant within Chinese society through cars and houses perpetuates the split between the haves and the have-nots, all while having a hugely questionable toll on the environment (the ever-present smog atop Beijing proper is a sure indicator). In America, there has been increased consciousness of the consequences of this wayward spending, product obsolescence, and trend-chasing – books such as The Story of Stuff detail exactly the effect of American consumerism on the global economy and environment. There has also been increased realization of the negative effects of sprawl and suburbia in America – the added pollution from commutes, a fragmentation of society between the haves and have-nots. These realizations, however, have not been spread en masse to the Chinese public, and thus the environmental aspects often don’t filter into their consciousness.

The Chinese government, to its credit, has been paying some attention. However, it often does both bad things and good things at the same time. They dig for more coal while researching renewable resources, and they approve building new housing away from the concentrated smog, which, as a corollary, perpetuates more pollution stemming from increased sprawl and commutes. The drive to seem modern, both by the people and by the country as a whole, seems to be perpetuating each one of these things, so that on the surface, they are repeating the same mistakes that the US has made in the past, but beneath that, there is a culturally-cultivated motivation for impression management.

However, the Chinese should not be fully blamed for chasing after wealth and status so quickly. The United States made similar mistakes in the past (think Gilded Age and the post-war economic boom), and has suffered consequences such as the Great Depression and economic recessions. However, by actively participating in consumerism at such a wasteful pace, the US has inadvertently and subliminally marketed its consumerism outlook everywhere. People thus associate America’s stately, plush estates or even its modest, garden homes, as well as plethora of other luxury items, as analogous and causal for America’s place in society. Thus, Americans should realize that with their economic choices, they may be influencing those in other countries that look up to the American lifestyle, and, on the other end, disgust those who find the American lifestyle wasteful and inconsiderate. The Chinese, on the other hand, should get over their fervent mimicry of luxurious values simply for the sake of external social capital and coming out on top relative to their fellow countrymen. They should realize the hole they are digging themselves into and the consequences of consumerist chase in hyperdrive mode.

In the end, the desire for material comfort and stability is not the culprit. It is the unrestrained pace of it, and the motivation behind that pace, that creates room for problems.

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Photos at Top

"BeiJing Vancouver Forest Villa." Panoramio. N.p., n.d. Web. 06 May 2014.

"Orange County." Henry Tsang Orange County. N.p., n.d. Web. 06 May 2014.

Miscellaneous References

"Winter Snow in Shanghai Suburb, China." Panoramio. N.p., n.d. Web. 06 May 2014.

Anton, Mike, and Henry Chu. "Welcome to Orange County, China." Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles Times, 09 Mar. 2002. Web. 06 May 2014.

Brook, Daniel. "Welcome to the O.C." Welcome to the O.C. Good Magazine, 22 Mar. 2008. Web. 06 May 2014.

Doctoroff, Tom. "What Chinese Consumers Want." The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 27 May 2012. Web. 06 May 2014.

Elsea, Daniel. "China's Chichi Suburbs / American-style Sprawl All the Rage in Beijing." SFGate. Hearst Newspapers (Hearst Communications, Inc), 24 Apr. 2005. Web. 06 May 2014.

Jaffe, Eric. "A Brief History of Suburbia's Rise and Fall." The Atlantic Cities. The Atlantic Monthly Group, 14 Mar. 2013. Web. 06 May 2014.

Rosenthal, Elisabeth. "North of Beijing, California Dreams Come True." The New York Times. The New York Times, 02 Feb. 2003. Web. 06 May 2014.