Welcome to the O.C.
By Daniel Brook from the World Student Press Company, May 6, 2008

China’s rising elite is importing a new American lifestyle, complete with fake lakes,
stucco ranch houses and Hummers in the driveway. But as these gated communities
grow, is China doomed to repeat all of America’s mistakes?
 
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.

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.

                                                

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.

                                                    

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 fellow Beijingers. 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.