China's Elite Learn to Flaunt It While the New Landless Weep
By JOSEPH KAHN
Published: December 25, 2004
BEIJING, Dec. 24 - Chateau Zhang Laffitte is no ordinary imitation. It is the oriental twin of Château Maisons-Laffitte, the French architect François Mansart's 1650 landmark on the Seine. Its symmetrical facade and soaring slate roof were crafted using the historic blueprints, 10,000 photographs and the same white Chantilly stone.
Yet its Chinese proprietor, a Beijing real estate developer named Zhang Yuchen, wanted more. He added a manicured sculpture garden and two wings, copying the palace at Fontainebleau. He even dug a deep, broad moat, though uniformed guards and a spiked fence also defend the castle.
"It cost me $50 million," Mr. Zhang said. "But that's because we made so many improvements compared with the original."
Rising out of the parched winter landscape of suburban Beijing, like a Gallic apparition, the chateau is a quirky extravagance intended to catch the eye of China's new rich. They can rent its rooms and, later, buy homes amid the ponds, equestrian trails and golf course on Mr. Zhang's 1.5-square-mile estate.
It is even more conspicuous to its nearest neighbors, 800 now landless peasants who used to grow wheat on its expansive lawns.
In a generation, China's ascetic, egalitarian society has acquired the trappings and the tensions of America in the age of the robber barons. A rough-and-tumble form of capitalism is eclipsing the remnants of socialism. Those who have made the transition live side by side with those who have not, separated by serrated fences and the Communist Party.
The party's Central Committee conducted a survey of party officials in November in which the widening income gap ranked as the biggest concern, mainly because it stirs social unrest. Farm incomes were raised this year after emergency rural tax cuts. The government has tried to slow land confiscations.
But officials have chosen not to give peasants control over the land they farm, effectively denying them a share in the new market economy.
Meanwhile, the fleet footed and well connected have profited from surging exports, a bubbly urban real estate market and, occasionally, government boosterism. A wide income gap, like that in Britain and the United States at the end of the 19th century, is viewed by some officials as inevitable, even a rite of passage.
China now has tens of thousands of multimillionaires, some of whom do not follow Confucian or Communist codes of austerity. In fact, pressure to stand out may be overtaking an earlier impulse to lie low.
Mr. Zhang, 57, is a Communist Party member and former senior official at Beijing's municipal construction bureau. He made a fortune building private homes before he secured rights to a sprawling parcel of wheat fields. As the first step in his next project, he cloned the palace and named it after himself.
He is wary of the political symbolism. His mirthful confidence gives way to bureaucratic hedging when he is asked to discuss the wealth gap. But he defends his indulgence as an excellent investment.
"Beijing is so crowded with luxury real estate projects that you need to do something special now," he said one afternoon while leading visitors through the marble atrium of the chateau. "Buyers want the right environment so they feel they are fully realizing their identity."
The bold display does attract attention, some of it unwelcome to Mr. Zhang. The residents of Yangge Village, who farmed the land as a collective until Mr. Zhang persuaded local leaders to let him develop the property, have led a tireless campaign for higher compensation.
As part of a complex arrangement to use the land, Mr. Zhang's company gives the village's elderly a $45 monthly stipend. The able-bodied young can apply for jobs maintaining the grounds and waterways of the estate, or crushing grapes from its vineyard. They get $2 a day.
For them, Mr. Zhang's French revival smacks of a retreat to feudalism.
"It was once our land, and now we have to apply to work there," says Li Chang, a local peasant activist. "To look at the place brings tears to my eyes."
Full Article http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/25/international/asia/25china.html?th
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