# Why China Banned Weird Architecture

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** PolyMatter
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoQvXW9QAPg

## Содержание

### [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoQvXW9QAPg) Segment 1 (00:00 - 05:00)

Gail Caddy was the owner of this tiny, boutique hotel in the English countryside when she came across a strange photo. It was a photo of her hotel. It had the same white façade, the same arched doorway, black placard, and name — “Rock Point Inn. ” …Except it wasn’t her hotel. Not quite. The one in the photo was newly built; hers was 250 years old. She soon discovered that her entire building — along with the fish-and-chips restaurant next door — had been carefully reproduced, brick-by-brick, on the other side of the planet. Unbeknownst to her, there were now two Rock Point Inns: one in Lyme Regis, England — population: 3,000 — and one in the suburbs of Shanghai — population: thirty million. And the more she learned, the weirder things became. This, it turns out, was just one corner of a $300 million British-themed neighborhood. There were bronze statues of Winston Churchill and Princess Diana. There was an exact replica of a Christian church in Bristol. And there were red telephone booths imported from London. Here, less than an hour outside China’s largest city, police officers wore royal guard uniforms. Even this was just the tip of the iceberg. The British neighborhood was actually one of nearly a dozen separate towns — each designed, at great expense, to simulate the experience of living in a different country. The German one, for example, is home to Volkswagen’s Chinese headquarters and, believe it or not, was built by the son of Hitler’s chief architect. All across China, in fact, are hundreds of miniature — and sometimes, not so miniature — Amsterdams, Paris’, Londons, and New Yorks. You can visit Britain’s famous Tower Bridge — complete with two extra towers — in Suzhou. If suburban McMansions and palm trees are more your style, there’s a mock “Orange County,” outside Beijing. Hallstatt is a tiny, picturesque village in the mountains of Austria. But you can visit an exact replica near Guangzhou. The mayor of the real town even paid a visit in 2012. Or perhaps you prefer to live in snowy Jackson Hole, Wyoming without ever leaving Northern China. The list goes on… There’s a fake Louvre, Chrysler Building, White House, and Versailles — to name just a few. China probably has more Eiffel Towers than anywhere else on earth. This one looked a bit out of place at first, but has since become more convincing. Clearly, these can’t all be the work of some rogue city planner or eccentric millionaire. Something about the country’s political and economic system unintentionally led to dozens of independent, yet identical, Frances across China. That “something” begins with the way cities earn revenue. Local governments pay for most of their own teachers and doctors and police and fire fighters — as they do in most of the world. Unlike most countries, however, they aren’t allowed to collect much of their own tax revenue — most of that ends up in Beijing. This creates for each city an acute dilemma: how to pay for everything. Luckily, they do have one powerful weapon at their disposal: land. …All of which is owned by the government, who can sell it to developers for 100% profit. What this means is that, to stay in the black, mayors have no choice but to choose quantity over quality. Opening a giant factory generates a massive windfall for the city when it sells the land. But because it doesn’t generate much ongoing revenue, it serves little purpose after it’s built. Just to keep the lights on, the city has to keep building, expanding outward at lightning speed. Of course, this only works if someone is willing to buy all the land. But that, until recently, hasn’t been much of a problem… Here, China had three big things going for it: One, the population was growing even faster than developers could keep up. Between 1980 and 2000, 267,000 people were born in China each and every week. That’s a new Buffalo, New York, or St. Louis, Missouri every seven days. At roughly one child per household, that’s a lot of new homes.

### [5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoQvXW9QAPg&t=300s) Segment 2 (05:00 - 10:00)

Two: hundreds of millions of families were moving from dilapidated homes in the countryside to shiny new apartments in the city. And three, even those who didn’t want to become homeowners really had no choice. China’s Capitalist turn at the end of the twenty century created lots of new wealth, yet conspicuously few places to invest it. Sure, you could simply park your money in the bank, but the government artificially kept interest rates at or near zero. You could take it to the stock market, but you may not have much luck there either. The Shanghai Stock Exchange has been more-or-less flat for the last decade. Finally, strict capital controls limit how much cash you can bring out of the country. That leaves approximately one place for the world’s largest middle class and the country with one of the highest savings rates in the world to store its wealth: housing. Until recently, Chinese real estate was a no-brainer. You could stuff RMB under your mattress and watch it dwindle away or you could stick it in the one certified money printing machine — then undefeated for decades. All of this is to say: homes have historically sold themselves in China! But it’s one thing to sell apartments in the heart of Shanghai or Shenzhen — China’s New York and San Francisco. It’s quite another to sell them in its equivalent of the Jersey suburbs or Inland Empire. As cities were forced to sell land further and further from their downtown cores, developers, in turn, were forced to go to greater and greater lengths to attract buyers. Yet China never experienced America’s urban flight. Cities are still widely associated with wealth and glamor, not noise and crime. Suburbs, therefore, are seen less as a welcome escape and more as an unnatural exile. That’s where the Eiffel Towers come in. Real estate agents — famously skilled at turning 200 square-foot studios into "cozy urban sanctuaries” — likewise transformed “weird, single-family homes in the middle-of-nowhere” into the more aspirational promise of “living the American Dream. ” It’s actually quite clever… The buyers of these properties, remember, are just looking for a safe place to store their wealth. Since they aren’t actually going to move here anyway, the practical realities of living in a faux-7,000-year-old Austrian village are relatively unimportant. And for developers, the European and American themes are the perfect short-cut: they offer a ready-built architectural template, create a spectacle that attracts attention, and allow them to capitalize on the idealized image of an affluent “West. ” Decades of rising home prices conditioned a whole generation to see easy, guaranteed returns. Every empty field they’ve ever seen was eventually colonized by factories; every housing complex soon sold out, so why would these be any different? Something similar was happening in less desirable third and fourth-tier cities across China. Say you’re the mayor of Chenzhou. Its population of 4. 5 million would make it one of the biggest metropolises in Europe or the Americas. In China, it’s so overlooked that it’s hard to find video of. There are at least 44 larger Chinese cities. So, how do you put this relative backwater “on the map? ” Well, one way is to hand a famous architect a blank check and tell them to go wild. Clearly, they understood these instructions. China might just be the world’s capital of “weird” architecture. There’s a building shaped like a bird in flight, a pair of pants, a ring, three men, eggs, a mountain range, the moon and the sun, an octopus, a flower, spaceship, beehive, and forest. You name it and China probably has it. As a local bureaucrat, your incentives were to drive short-term economic growth and quickly make a name for yourself before being rotated to a new city. Approving that splashy new project puts your name in the newspaper. Besides, you’ll be long gone by the time the Orangatang-shaped hospital sits empty and unused.

### [10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoQvXW9QAPg&t=600s) Segment 3 (10:00 - 14:00)

In other words, the more outlandish, the better. One overzealous official spent one third of his city’s entire revenue building a replica of the U. S. Capitol to serve as a government office. Meaning, Communist Party cadres work every day inside an architectural tribute to their country’s greatest competitor. How’s that for soft power? Of course, when everyone tries to stand out, no one does. Inevitably, this ignites a full-blown “weirdness” arms-race. Now, to some, this is all just an amusing — perhaps even endearing — feature of the Chinese landscape. Sometimes you just stumble into a random Stonehenge. Better than row after row of dreary Soviet-era high-rises! Xi Jinping, however, is not among them. After rising to power, Xi saw his mission as correcting for the excesses of China’s long reform era — its rampant corruption, its uncoordinated waste, and blind, “Western-obsessed” consumerism. “Weird” architecture was a symptom of all three. And so, in 2014, he “banned” it, in the vague, jargon-heavy way Party officials do — by calling on cities to “strengthen their cultural confidence” and “disseminate contemporary Chinese values. ” And just like that, China’s “Las Vegas” era was officially over. But there’s one place where China’s early-2000s penchant for the opulent, the colossal, and the garish truly lives on — a sort of living museum of that earlier era. About 20 miles away from Hong Kong is another “Special Administrative Region” called Macau. Macau is one of the most densely-populated and most land-deprived cities on earth. So, naturally, about 15 years ago, Las Vegas Sands’ Sheldon Adelson — then America’s third-richest person — decided it would make the perfect place to plop down a brand new, car-centric casino strip. The Venetian Macau is the largest casino in the world. And, like its smaller Vegas counterpart, includes an indoor gondola ride. Next door is The Parisian, complete — you guessed it — with an Eiffel Tower. It’s one of the most surreal places I’ve ever been — a fake Paris in a former Portuguese colony, culturally, largely Chinese, but not quite, built by an American billionaire. In fact, I made a whole video about it, exclusively available on our streaming service Nebula. Nebula is also home to dozens of other great Original series, like Lindsay Ellis’ “The Life and Death of Family-Friendly Las Vegas” — a fascinating look at the city’s attempt to steal Disneyland’s market. Neo has this amazing 3D tour of the Vegas strip — and who owns it. And, if you like my videos, you’ll almost certainly like RealLifeLore’s new Original “Mad Kings,” about the world’s most insane and eccentric modern dictators. The first episode, about the crazy life of Saddam Hussein’s eldest son, is out now. And that’s just scratching the surface of what Nebula has to offer. You can even give your friends guest passes so they can watch along with you — for no extra charge. Now, normally, Nebula costs $6 a month. But you can get it for just half that by signing up for a year with the link on screen or in the description now. That’s just $3 a month for loads of exclusive content you’ll love. Alternatively, click the link below to get Nebula Lifetime for $200 off (that’s 40%! ) — giving you unlimited access to everything Nebula has to offer for life.

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*Источник: https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/24406*