The O.C. made in China

I don’t know if it’s a coincidence or not, but just after having read the article on suburbia in USA Today, I stumbled upon another article in the May/June issue of Good magazine (I haven’t found the online version) that addresses the same phenomenon. A community located near the Beijing airport in China has replicated California’s Orange County. Wealthy Chinese families who live in this gated area can benefit from huge mansions, SUVs and fake lakes.

But the Chinese O.C. is not entirely similar to the American one. The discrepancies between the two reveal a lot about the Chinese society. This extract from the article is a good example:

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.