Letter from Beijing: Where's Times Square? The Champs Élysées? Beverly Hills? Yosemite? London? Windsor Park? The Riviera? Napa Valley? If you think they're in New York, France, California or England, you're not wrong - but they're also in Beijing and Shanghai.
In Ireland in the early 1990s, property developers, trying to attract the aspirational new rich, assumed that the models of gentility were all from the English home counties and gave us estates with names such as Sussex Grove or Windsor Downs.
One of the most striking markers of social and cultural change in China, and arguably of cultural dislocation, is that the same trend is rampant. More often than not, new luxury apartment blocks and suburban villas are packaged with western names (written in the roman alphabet) and western images of the good life.
I've been keeping a list of new estates and apartment blocks that I've spotted on my travels and its highlights to date include the following from the suburbs of Beijing: Champagne Cove, Yosemite Villa, Chateau Glory, The Manor, Oriental Hawaii, Champagne Villas, Palais de Fortune, King Field, Palais Royal, Napa Valley, Vale Villa, California East, Chateau Regency, Roman Garden, Beijing Riviera, Merlin Champagne Town, Demense de Golf, and Chateau Regalia.
Not to be outdone, Shanghai offers the following: Beverly Hills Garden, California, Royal Pavilion, Champs Élysées, Manhattan Heights, London Plaza, Le Chateau, Rancho Santa Fe, Windsor Park, Baroque Palace, Times Square, Uptown, The Emerald Forest and San Marino.
There are, it is true, lots of clichéd Chinese names such as Dragon Villas and Lotus Park. There are weird hybrids such as Somerset Xahui. And there are odd names that seem to be English translations of Chinese phrases, such as My Dear Villa, New Life of Warm (sic) and Happiness City, and Green Smile.
But mostly the image the property developers and real estate agents want to project is of a fantasy land where a vaguely apprehended western lifestyle is lived, and made up of equals parts Hollywood, the Mediterranean, Paris, London and New York. There is a chic, happy, glamorous world of wealth and leisure and sunshine out there somewhere and Chinese people are being told they can live in it too.
Sometimes, the cultural reference points are, in the Chinese context, rather startling. One new development that I went to see in a newly opened northwestern suburb of Beijing, towards the airport, is called Beds of Spices. The name comes from the Bible, specifically from the Song of Solomon in the Old Testament.
Some of the promotional material for the development quotes the passage (without giving the source): "Where has your beloved gone, you fairest among women? Where has your beloved turned, that we may seek him with you? My beloved has gone down to his garden, to the beds of spices, to feed in the gardens, and to gather lilies. I am my beloved's, and my beloved is mine. He browses among the lilies."
But the posters and brochures for the Beds of Spices development draw on a different cultural source, though one that is still unmistakably western: European pastoral painting of the 18th century. As it has long been in Europe and America, the instinctive impulse of the property developer who has just built up what used to be a rural area is to immediately wrap the whole thing in an exaggerated rusticity.
The cover of the Beds of Spices brochure is a mock-French landscape with mountains, a river and blooming trees, all suffused in a golden light of tranquillity. Three female French peasants in neat white bonnets are working (but not too hard) in the corn field in the foreground. The posters have a similarly coy scene of rural bliss, with a sweet little dog yapping after a European family in a horse and cart.
I went to see the show apartments in the half-built Beds of Spices. The style was cool, dark, minimalist and chic, with discreet wardrobes and Danish under-floor heating. The desired feel was calm, spacious, almost womb-like: a promise of privacy, a retreat from an overcrowded country.
On the shelf in the bedroom there was a picture frame with three oval shapes inside for the photographic portraits of the putative owners, but they were filled with pictures of a gorgeous-looking blond European or American father, mother and son. The invitation was clear: your face could be here.
The estranged nature of the naming and advertising, with its careful avoidance of any real reference to China, tells its own truth. For the vast majority of Chinese people, these apartments are as distant a fantasy as Beverly Hills or 18th-century French pastoral could ever be. The estate agent said the likely buyers would be pilots from the nearby airport or middle-managers with the local branches of high-tech multinationals such as Panasonic and Toshiba.
Even at prices that are very low by Irish standards (€100,000 would get you a spacious four-bedroom apartment), they are hard to sell. In reality most Chinese people simply can't afford the chic privacy on offer. But they can dream of lying in a bed of spices on the Champs Élysées in the Napa Valley, drinking champagne while cheery French peasants wave to them from the corn fields.
