Orange County, China
The extent of China's embrace of American-style suburbanization is best illustrated by one of its newest gated communities, which is actually called Orange County.
"A guard wearing a one-size-too-big military uniform salutes my driver through the gate at the grand entrance to Orange County. Suddenly we’re transported from China to, well, somewhere else. Where, exactly, is hard to say. It would be strange enough if Orange County, this gated community near the Beijing airport, were the straight-up replica of Southern California it claims to be. But it is stranger than that. The development, 45 minutes up the freeway from Beijing’s better-known Forbidden City, has the appearance of a Disney theme park where someone mixed up all the different sections—a smidgen of Epcot’s faux Paris intermingled with Main Street U.S.A.’s Americana.
At Orange County, California-style ranch houses sit alongside English Tudors and a French-style formal garden complete with stately fountains (turned off for the winter). The street signs of weathered wood held together with rusty spikes conjure the Old West of Durango while the community clubhouse, called the Rive Gauche Town Center, has a mansard roof typical of a French country estate. The totem poles inside recall the Pacific Northwest and the fireplace mantlepiece is carved in the shape of English-language books, including Hamlet, Macbeth, and the erroneously titled Moby-Dock. So far from the West, the distinctions between France and America, let alone Colorado and California, get lost.
[Some] critics...see the development as emblematic of China’s burgeoning car culture and its wholehearted embrace of environmentally destructive growth. The journalist Ted Conover tsk-tsked in The New York Times that while China rushes to build 'new gated communities, new themed enclaves, all for the car-owning class, [what is] conspicuously missing [is] a corresponding investment in mass transit, in public spaces, and public access.' As China industrializes, many fear that the country is making the same environmental mistakes the United States made a century ago, worrying that the planet cannot sustain such an onslaught from its most populous nation.
If Orange County is to be typical of development in the new China, it would seem that the world’s most populous country is hurtling toward a dystopian future—and taking the rest of the planet with it."
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complex reality of China buried in middle of article
Which goes on to say:
"as of now, Harvard’s Oliver notes, “the most commonly seen residential development is several-story-high buildings on newly urbanized land,” which are invariably served by a bus route if not a subway line. In short, it’s a far cry from Southern California.
Contemporary urban planning for China’s major cities can be described as an “and the kitchen sink” strategy. From an environmental perspective, China is essentially doing all the wrong things and all the right things at the same time. The cities are growing so rapidly that the authorities are giving it everything they’ve got, planning for sprawl and smart growth simultaneously. For example, the Chinese government is building a highway system to rival America’s, but it is also building a subway system in Shanghai that will be bigger than New York’s."
The Middle Kingdom
There's been a lot of focus on Chinese development but much it is in eastern China. The further west you go, the more backwards the place is so the government faces millions of Chinese who have been left out of the economic boom since freeing up the market in the late 80s and early 90s. The Communist Party has to make some rationale for being in power since the economic ideology is as discredited as the painted over hammer and sickle on a wall I saw when I was in central China. The government must ensure enough economic growth to stifle unrest and throw in a lot of nationalism to control over a billion people.
The Chinese have a lot of money from exports to throw into projects and the government doesn't have to get the consent of the people to make major changes. I suspect that some Americans may make the case that we need to adopt some Chinese methods at the expense of some freedoms. That sounds crazy now but it should recalled that Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union had some admirers (including urban planners) who saw governments that made the trains run on time.