China is seeing a new wave of luxury living and lavish lifestyles, with a new generation of ‘little emperors’ showing off their wealth. But the gap between the rich and the poor is rising, and new tales of poverty are coming from - ironically - Hong Kong.
2 comments:
China’s rich flaunt their wealth
China is seeing a new wave of luxury living and lavish lifestyles, with a new generation of ‘little emperors’ showing off their wealth. But the gap between the rich and the poor is rising, and new tales of poverty are coming from - ironically - Hong Kong.
By Peh Shing Huei
11 October 2009
Beijing: When a young Chinese woman dispatched 30 Mercedes Benzes to pick up her one dog from the airport last month, it fuelled growing public anger towards an emerging new class in China.
She is part of the ‘fu er dai’ or ‘rich second generation’. Mostly in their 20s, they are perceived as having done little to earn their inherited riches.
They grew up as ‘little emperors’, living the high life on the mountains of money that their parents made after China embraced market capitalism in 1978.
These young people are often not afraid to flaunt their wealth and offer no apologies for their extravagant lifestyles - and that has touched a raw nerve.
For example, the woman who felt her dog worthy of an expensive ride from the airport and gave her name only as Ms. Wang was quoted by the media as saying: ‘Gold has a price but this Tibetan mastiff doesn’t.’
She paid four million yuan (S$818,000) for the mastiff - a fairly rare breed valued by the nomadic peoples of Central Asia for its skill as a watchdog - and pledged to spare no expense to take care of it.
Ms. Wang, who the Xi’an Evening News said was young, said she fed her dog at least 10 bottles of mineral water a day and estimated her dog’s daily living expenses at 100 yuan - no small change when you consider that the average cleaner in China takes home only 1,000 yuan a month.
She would also see to it that the dog lived in air-conditioned comfort of not more than 17 deg C as it enjoyed its food - a diet of mainly chicken meat and beef bone soup.
‘Such ridiculous behaviour was designed to attract attention. It was an advertisement to show off wealth,’ said social commentator Hu Xingdou. ‘Such abnormal and unhealthy displays of wealth can lead to much unhappiness among the poor and may even lead to hatred.’ The phrase ‘fen fu’, or hate the rich, has been coined recently to capture the public’s mood towards this class’ crass show of lavish consumption.
China’s media has regularly featured stories about the wild spending habits of the rich - how one spent six million yuan on a Blancpain watch and another dropped 10 million yuan on a Bentley Mulliner limousine.
This, after all, is a communist nation founded on the ideals of a classless society that spent its first decades desperately, and sometimes viciously, fighting to eradicate social stratification.
But when the late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping urged the country to ‘let some people get rich first’ in the early 1980s, what followed turned the country into one of the world’s most unequal societies.
A Goldman Sachs report recently ranked China as the world’s second- largest luxury goods market, overtaking the US and lagging only behind Japan. Still the country has about 200 million people living below the poverty line, and subsisting on less than US$1 (S$1.40) a day.
On Friday, Chinese reports said the country is set to surpass Japan by the end of the year, with sales hitting five billion yuan, almost double last year’s three billion yuan.
China’s Gini coefficient, which measures income inequality, is 0.447, one of the highest in Asia. That is evidently worrying the Chinese government, as Premier Wen Jiabao said last month at the World Economic Forum that income distribution must be narrowed.
Open displays of wealth, which are a fairly new phenomenon in modern China, must also be reined in.
‘When you have too many of such examples of the rich flaunting their wealth, the poor will wonder if they can ever make that much money,’ said Professor Sun Shuhong of the Cheungkei Research Centre for Luxury Goods and Services at the University of International Business and Economics.
‘The divide will widen and social tensions will spike.’
The fear is that the widening income gap could lead to social unrest, with the poor convinced that the rich are not only wealthy, but also powerful with the law on their side.
The story of 20-year-old Hu Bin, is one such example. The son of rich parents in Hangzhou city in eastern China knocked down and killed a university student from a poor family while street-racing in a modified car in May.
Mr. Hu’s friends were photographed smoking and joking while waiting for the police and medical help, firing up much public fury.
When Mr. Hu appeared with a plumper look at his sentencing, Chinese netizens speculated that his family had paid for a stand-in.
He was sent to prison for three years, igniting further anger among those who believed the Hus had paid off the courts for a light sentence.
‘Most of China’s rich lack social responsibility,’ said Professor Hu. ‘In the past, it was said that entrepreneurs fulfilled their social obligations by producing material goods for the people. But now, people expect the rich to perform charitable deeds too. They have a responsibility to give back to society.’
Post a Comment