[Huaxi’s so-called New
Village in the Sky — at 1,076 feet, a bit taller than the Chrysler Building in
Manhattan — is getting finishing touches this summer in preparation for an
October opening. Among other attractions, it will have a five-star hotel, a
gold-leaf-embellished concert hall, an upscale shopping mall and what is billed
as Asia’s largest revolving restaurant. Also, it will have five life-size
statues of a water buffalo, Huaxi’s symbol, on every 12th floor or so.]
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| On the ground floor of New Village in the Sky, a Dubai-inspired skyscraper in the village of Huaxi, final touches are being put on a cavernous concert hall that can seat 1,600 peopl |
HUAXI, China
— Ask not why the citizens of this village of 2,000, a few hours by car
northwest of Shanghai, have built a 74-story skyscraper next to their prim town
square. Everybody in China knows
the answer: it is another step in their plan to create the communist utopia
envisioned by Mao.
The utopia part
certainly seems plausible. Whether Mao would have approved is a bit more in
doubt.
Huaxi’s so-called New
Village in the Sky — at 1,076 feet, a bit taller than the Chrysler Building in
Manhattan — is getting finishing touches this summer in preparation for an
October opening. Among other attractions, it will have a five-star hotel, a
gold-leaf-embellished concert hall, an upscale shopping mall and what is billed
as Asia’s largest revolving restaurant. Also, it will have five life-size
statues of a water buffalo, Huaxi’s symbol, on every 12th floor or so.
That this
half-billion-dollar edifice is a good 40-minute drive from a city of any size
is part of the plan. For though not many foreigners have heard of Huaxi,
Chinese far and wide know it as the socialist collective that works — the
village where public ownership of the means of production has not just made
everyone equal, but rich, too.
Two million tourists
come annually to view the Huaxi marvel, no small number of them officials from
other villages who yearn to know how Huaxi did it. The enormous skyscraper,
topped with a gigantic gold sphere, will never win architectural awards. But it
will add to Huaxi’s allure, the village fathers confidently predict — and soak
up tourist money as well.
“We call it the
three-increase building,” said Wu Renbao, 84, the town’s revered patriarch,
meaning that it will increase Huaxi’s acreage (by half), increase its work
force (by 3,000) and, hardly least of all, increase its wealth.
If he is right, all
2,000 villagers will get a little richer. They all own a piece of the building
— just as they own the town’s steel mill, textile factory, greenhouse complex,
ocean shipping company and other ventures. That is Huaxi’s carefully curated
narrative: by rigidly adhering to socialism with Chinese characteristics, the citizens
of this little village have created an oasis of prosperity and comfort that is
the envy of the world.
When China effectively
embraced capitalism in the 1980s, Huaxi was an agrarian hovel, reachable by
dirt roads. Mr. Wu, then the local Communist Party secretary, seized on the new
market freedoms to shift the Huaxi economy from farming to manufacturing and
trade, but with a twist: the residents would throw their money into a
collective pot and share in the take from whatever new businesses they bought.
“In the 30 years after
the opening up, the system changed in many places,” Mr. Wu’s son, Wu Xie’en,
said in a recent interview. “Some chose private ownership, but we Huaxi people
chose public ownership. The biggest benefit is that the people share the common
prosperity.”
That Huaxi is prosperous
seems undeniable. Here, the villagers get lavish annual stipends, live in
spacious single-family homes instead of China’s usual cramped apartments, drive
imported cars, and get basic medical care, education and even an annual
vacation free from the government. Lately they also get free helicopter rides,
courtesy of a 100 million renminbi, or $15.5 million, fleet of helicopters and
small jets the village is buying to attract still more sightseers.
Ge Xiufang, now 62, was
a penniless peasant in a northern area of Jiangsu Province when her newly
graduated son began looking for work in the early 1990s. “He saw an ad in the
paper calling for workers to come to Huaxi,” she said. “So we came here, and
two years later, we became villagers.”
That was in 1993, before
Huaxi took off. Ms. Ge was interviewed in her son’s house, a two-story building
with marble floors, overstuffed leather sofas, a large aquarium and a liquor
cabinet dominated by an enormous bottle of expensive Scotch. Ms. Ge said she
and her husband live in a sprawling town house a few blocks away and shuttle
between homes in one of the family’s three cars.
“We peasants, we didn’t
even have apartment buildings in those days,” she said. “We had no idea it
would be this good.”
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Sim Chi Yin for The New York Times
The skyscraper will include a five-star
hotel, upscale shopping mall, revolving
restaurant and five life-size statues
of a water buffalo, Huaxi’s symbol.
|
The elder Mr. Wu extols
Huaxi’s splendor — and the Beijing government’s wisdom and foresight — in a
lengthy lecture given each morning in an auditorium packed with hundreds of
tourists. To hammer the message home, there follows a musical, a sort of
Chinese opera with Disney characteristics and toe-tapping lyrics:
Where we live: garden,
house, little Western-style mansion
What we eat: a food
culture full of nutrition
What we wear: big brand
names of fashion
and
Huaxi is rich in
substance, politics and spirit
One American guest said,
“O.K., O.K,
Socialism is so good, we
Americans want it, too!”
Yet what is branded as
socialism looks from the outside a great deal like an old-fashioned capitalist
corporation, apparently savvily managed, with 2,000 shareholders who live
comfortably off their dividends. Indeed, Huaxi’s affairs are run by a company,
the Jiangsu Huaxi Group Corporation, reported to shelter 57 subsidiaries,
including seven more holding companies. The town has interests in everything
from extruded aluminum to traditional medicine to spun polyester cloth to real
estate.
“We have too many
investments to count,” said the younger Mr. Wu, the chief executive of the
enterprise, which is said on several Web sites to be managed by members of the
Wu family. He said he spends his days worrying about investment bubbles, and
sprinkles his conversation with references to business advice gleaned at the
University of California, Berkeley, and from studies of General Electric’s
business model.
Mr. Wu’s claims of
success are hard to verify, because the conglomerate’s revenue and earnings are
not disclosed in an audited form. Published but unverified reports indicate
that the corporation employs at least 25,000 people, many of whom live in the
urban area of about 30,000 that exists outside Huaxi’s cramped legal
boundaries. A 2009 report in a state-run newspaper said annual revenue totaled
50 billion renminbi, about $7.7 billion at current exchange rates.
Village leaders have
denied persistent reports that Huaxi benefits from substantial government
subsidies like low-interest loans, although the younger Mr. Wu said in an
interview that some of the village’s ventures are financed by debt that amounts
to as much as 60 percent of their value.
While each villager is
required to work at a Huaxi business seven days a week, virtually all the
manual labor is performed by what Marx might have called the proletariat:
thousands of outside workers, many of them migrants, who receive better
salaries and benefits than many workers elsewhere, but do not share in Huaxi’s
profits. For that, one needs a hukou, or residence permit — and Huaxi hands
those out with great care.
“This is called
exploitation,” said Fei-Ling Wang, a Georgia Tech professor who has studied
Huaxi as part of research into Jiangsu Province villages. “Because the outside
workers, by law, cannot become a local resident. They cannot share the results
of their works. And they are paid by wages, and if they lost their job, they
are simply sent home.
“If all migrant workers
are treated as full members of the community,” Professor Wang said, “then Huaxi
wouldn’t work.”
The two Wus allow that
the village has yet been unable to shed capitalism, but they insist that Huaxi
has moved to a higher level of socialism than China at large, and that utopia
is a matter of time. “Huaxi’s development depends on capitalism and business,”
the elder Mr. Wu said. But “capitalism is only a temporary stage. Eventually,
we will build Chinese socialism with Chinese characteristics.”
To Huaxi’s 2,000
shareholders, it may be a distinction without a difference as long as the
profits keep rolling in. Mr. Wu says they will: in three decades, he insists,
not one business venture has gone sour. To Huaxi’s cautious villagers, he said,
investing is “like stepping on sea ice.”
Will a 74-story building
in the middle of nowhere crack the ice? Not likely, the Wus say: why, just in
the last year, one of the building’s water buffalos has grown in value by 70
million renminbi, or about $10.7 million.
That would be the
buffalo destined for the 74th floor. The one cast in solid gold.
Jonathan Kaiman contributed research.
