the sky than almost anywhere else on earth. The view managed to be both tacky and awe-inspiring at the same time. Highest among the cluster of spiking, sloping, curving towers was one of the world’s tallest buildings, the 492 -meter-high bottle-opener-shaped Shanghai World Financial Center, and the red minaretlike dome of the Oriental Pearl Tower flanked by two tinny-looking replica globes. Twenty years earlier most of Pudong had been farmland. Today, it pulsated with light and color. There was no more stunning vista of modern China.
As soon as I stepped out of the taxi, I was approached by a migrant beggar and a drug dealer offering marijuana. Cars were pulling up and disgorging beautifully dressed couples, mostly expat Western men and their Chinese girlfriends. We shared an elevator near a stairwell decorated with discarded bicycles, a work by the artist Ai Weiwei. On the fourth floor, I met Emily in Lounge 18, decorated in “Haute Bohemian” style with walls of candles and faux opium dens. In the cigar lounge, she introduced me to the French food and beverage manager, Julian Desmettre. Over a mojito, he told me how the nouveaux riches from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore had made the city their playground: “Shanghai is like Paris during la Belle Epoque. This is the city of wealth and style, where people must show their money, where they are judged by how they dress, where they look down on those with less than themselves.”
Julian had arrived in Shanghai as a student eight years earlier with just 5,000 yuan in his pocket. Now, he had an Omega watch worth six times that amount on his wrist and wore Zegna shoes and a Hugo Boss suit that he could never have afforded in the past. “My life here is better than in France. I have a big apartment, a cleaner, a compound with a pool and a gym. It is so comfortable, it is almost too much. I am very happy.”
He saw a similar change in the city. There were more Ferraris and Porsches than in the past. There was a wider choice of restaurants than in Paris. The supermarkets contained the finest food and drink from around the world, albeit at more than twice the price it would be in Europe. The change was accelerating. “What they did before in ten years, they now do in two. All of the world’s big brands are opening stores in Shanghai. There are so many customers here.”
Most of the revelers in his lounge were Europeans. The disparity between expats and locals was even more pronounced on the Bar Rouge terrace on the sixth floor, where mostly foreign partygoers drank and danced to techno music, bathed in blue neon light under a fluttering red Chinese flag. They were marketing agents, corporate managers, language teachers, and others in the vanguard of global consumer culture. There were some stylish locals too, but most of the Chinese appeared to be girls paid to dance on the tables, keep the mood suitably scandalous, and encourage the expat customers to buy rounds of shots served in test tubes.
“Where can I meet Chinese partygoers?” I asked Emily.
She was reluctant to recommend anywhere: “There are clubs, but they are the type of place you would find in a second-tier city. The music and decor are not as good, but Chinese men prefer them because they don’t want to be near foreigners. Chinese women are different. They are more open. They go where the quality is.”
I left alone. Outside the building, a weary-looking hooker touted for business and a dealer offered cocaine for 1,000 yuan per gram. Wandering bars and restaurants, I met a man who claimed to be one of the city’s earliest nightclub owners. He claimed to be halfway toward his ambition of licking the nipples of 10,000 women. From others, I learned how bar owners had to pay off the police by taking out a subscription to the monthly public security magazine costing more than 20,000 yuan ($2,857) a copy. They organized prostitutes for their customers and trips to karaoke parlors where hostesses stripped off to sing, and to the saunas on Wuzonglu where masseuses used their soaped naked bodies to wash clients. Shanghai was emulating the consumer sex industry of Tokyo.
There were other reminders of Japan at the height of its “bubble economy.” During the peak of its excess in the late eighties, the most notorious binge spending and clubbing took place at a club called Juliana’s, where microskirted
The next day, Emily helped me climb farther up the social ladder with an introduction to the head of a thriving marketing agency.
Cindy Tai was a former head of EMI Music in China who had helped to organize the first Rolling Stones concert in Shanghai. Perhaps for this reason, she spoke the language of pop altruism. In near flawless English she told me how her values were changing.
“We must focus on inner beauty, not the luxury outside. If we can all save on what we consume, then we can feed the starving people.”
When she was a child, Cindy had a
The doll was confiscated by Red Guards, along with her mum’s high heels, soon after the Cultural Revolution began. The only playthings allowed were revolutionary dolls in Mao suits. Cindy and her academic parents were sent to a farm on the nearby island of Chongming, where she turned her musical talent to playing revolutionary songs. “We had enough to eat but nothing to spare. We were very happy if we got a little meat on the table once a week. My parents suffered at that time. I vowed that one day I would buy them whatever they wanted.”
That was easy for her now, but, after I told her I was writing a book about the environment, she insisted she had grown out of materialist ambitions.
“My dream now is to create an organic farm. I would like to grow fruit, vegetables, and rice, to raise pigs and chickens. And to have a helicopter to drive me around because the traffic is so bad.”
Like many affluent consumers around the world, her idea of environmentalism seemed to be choosing what was healthy for her rather than for the planet. She had blueberries delivered from the local organic farm, baguettes from a French bakery in Xintiandi, and olive oil from Italy. She dined out at least once a day.
Cindy was conflicted by the competing pressures to be green and to be seen. She had recently been thinking of buying a Porsche. After sales agents took her out for a spin on Shanghai’s F1 racetrack, she initially put in an order for a 1-million-yuan black Porsche. “It’s a novelty thing. Everyone had one, so I felt I had to get one to keep up with the Joneses.”
But she said she was having second thoughts. “We keep to a minimum because we want to be green and environmentally friendly. We are very conscious of the environment. We are trying to save the earth so we should not produce a lot of waste. I am very concerned. Everyone is talking about global warming.”
At one point she and her French husband had four cars: a BMW, an MG, and a couple of Mercedes-Benzes. Now they had only two, a sign, she said, of their increased concern for the planet. Later in the conversation she revealed her interest had switched to yachts. One was moored near their second home in Cannes. Another was being built.
She may yet get another luxury car. Cindy was already a member of the Shanghai Porsche Club, mainly to keep up with her friends. She checked her mobile phone for a text message about the next event, a cocktail party and awards ceremony hosted by Jaguar and the style magazine
“They insist I go. I guess they want all the posh people there,” she said. Sensing a social-climbing opportunity, I shamelessly asked if I could attend. Her manners were far too good to refuse.
The venue for the Jaguar Gorgeous Award Party was a renovated mansion off Huaihai Road, just a few minutes’ walk away from the Barbie store. In cocktail dresses and designer suits, the guests sipped wine in the courtyard, waiting for VIPs to show up, sign the visitor board, have their photographs taken, and be whisked off for a sales pitch for the new 5-liter XKR.
