Why China Banned Weird Architecture

0:00 Gail Caddy was the owner of this tiny,

0:03 boutique hotel in the English countryside when she came across a strange photo.

0:09 It was a photo of her hotel.

0:12 It had the same white façade, the same arched doorway,

0:16 black placard, and name— “Rock Point Inn.” …Except it wasn’t her hotel.

0:23 Not quite.

0:24 The one in the photo was newly built; hers was 250 years old.

0:32 She soon discovered that her entire building— along

0:35 with the fish-and-chips restaurant next door— had been carefully reproduced,

0:40 brick-by-brick, on the other side of the planet.

0:44 Unbeknownst to her, there were now two Rock Point Inns: one in Lyme Regis,

0:50 England— population:

0:51 3,000— and one in the suburbs of Shanghai— population: thirty million.

0:58 And the more she learned, the weirder things became.

1:03 This, it turns out, was just one

1:06 corner of a $300 million British-themed neighborhood.

1:10 There were bronze statues of Winston Churchill and Princess Diana.

1:14 There was an exact replica of a Christian church in Bristol.

1:19 And there were red telephone booths imported from London.

1:23 Here, less than an hour outside China’s largest city,

1:28 police officers wore royal guard uniforms.

1:31 Even this was just the tip of the iceberg.

1:35 The British neighborhood was actually one

1:37 of nearly a dozen separate towns— each designed,

1:41 at great expense, to simulate the experience of living in a different country.

1:46 The German one, for example,

1:48 is home to Volkswagen’s Chinese headquarters and, believe it or not,

1:53 was built by the son of Hitler’s chief architect.

1:56 All across China, in fact, are hundreds of miniature— and sometimes,

2:01 not so miniature— Amsterdams, Paris’, Londons, and New Yorks.

2:07 You can visit Britain’s famous Tower Bridge—

2:10 complete with two extra towers— in Suzhou.

2:14 If suburban McMansions and palm trees are more your style,

2:18 there’s a mock “Orange County,” outside Beijing.

2:21 Hallstatt is a tiny, picturesque village in the mountains of Austria.

2:26 But you can visit an exact replica near Guangzhou.

2:29 The mayor of the real town even paid a visit in 2012.

2:35 Or perhaps you prefer to live in snowy Jackson Hole,

2:39 Wyoming without ever leaving Northern China.

2:42 The list goes on… There’s a fake Louvre, Chrysler Building,

2:46 White House, and Versailles— to name just a few.

2:50 China probably has more Eiffel Towers than anywhere else on earth.

2:55 This one looked a bit out of place at first,

2:59 but has since become more convincing.

3:02 Clearly, these can’t all be the work

3:05 of some rogue city planner or eccentric millionaire.

3:08 Something about the country’s political and economic

3:12 system unintentionally led to dozens of independent,

3:15 yet identical, Frances across China.

3:19 That “something” begins with the way cities earn revenue.

3:24 Local governments pay for most of their own teachers and doctors

3:27 and police and fire fighters— as they do in most of the world.

3:32 Unlike most countries, however, they aren’t allowed to collect much of their own

3:37 tax revenue— most of that ends up in Beijing.

3:41 This creates for each city an acute dilemma: how to pay for everything.

3:46 Luckily, they do have one powerful weapon at their disposal: land.

3:52 …All of which is owned by the government,

3:55 who can sell it to developers for 100% profit.

3:59 What this means is that, to stay in the black,

4:01 mayors have no choice but to choose quantity over quality.

4:06 Opening a giant factory generates a massive windfall

4:09 for the city when it sells the land.

4:12 But because it doesn’t generate much ongoing revenue,

4:15 it serves little purpose after it’s built.

4:18 Just to keep the lights on, the city has to keep building,

4:24 expanding outward at lightning speed.

4:26 Of course, this only works if someone is willing to buy all the land.

4:31 But that, until recently, hasn’t been much of a problem… Here,

4:36 China had three big things going for it:

4:40 One, the population was growing even faster than developers could keep up.

4:45 Between 1980 and 2000, 267,000 people were born in China each and every week.

4:52 That’s a new Buffalo, New York, or St.

4:57 Louis, Missouri every seven days.

4:59 At roughly one child per household, that’s a lot of new homes.

5:05 Two: hundreds of millions of families were moving from dilapidated

5:08 homes in the countryside to shiny new apartments in the city.

5:13 And three, even those who didn’t want to become homeowners really had no choice.

5:20 China’s Capitalist turn at the end

5:22 of the twenty century created lots of new wealth,

5:25 yet conspicuously few places to invest it.

5:29 Sure, you could simply park your money in the bank,

5:32 but the government artificially kept interest rates at or near zero.

5:37 You could take it to the stock market,

5:39 but you may not have much luck there either.

5:42 The Shanghai Stock Exchange has been more-or-less flat for the last decade.

5:48 Finally, strict capital controls limit how much

5:50 cash you can bring out of the country.

5:54 That leaves approximately one place for the world’s

5:56 largest middle class and the country

5:58 with one of the highest savings rates in the world to store its wealth: housing.

6:04 Until recently, Chinese real estate was a no-brainer.

6:08 You could stuff RMB under your mattress and watch it dwindle away or you

6:13 could stick it in the one certified

6:16 money printing machine— then undefeated for decades.

6:20 All of this is to say: homes have historically sold themselves in China!

6:26 But it’s one thing to sell apartments in the heart

6:30 of Shanghai or Shenzhen— China’s New York and San Francisco.

6:33 It’s quite another to sell them in its

6:37 equivalent of the Jersey suburbs or Inland Empire.

6:41 As cities were forced to sell land

6:43 further and further from their downtown cores, developers, in turn,

6:47 were forced to go to greater and greater lengths to attract buyers.

6:52 Yet China never experienced America’s urban flight.

6:56 Cities are still widely associated with wealth and glamor, not noise and crime.

7:03 Suburbs, therefore, are seen less as a welcome

7:08 escape and more as an unnatural exile.

7:11 That’s where the Eiffel Towers come in.

7:15 Real estate agents— famously skilled at turning 200

7:19 square-foot studios into "cozy urban sanctuaries”— likewise transformed “weird,

7:24 single-family homes in the middle-of-nowhere”

7:26 into the more aspirational promise of “living

7:30 the American Dream.” It’s actually quite clever… The buyers of these properties,

7:35 remember, are just looking for a safe place to store their wealth.

7:39 Since they aren’t actually going to move here anyway,

7:43 the practical realities of living

7:46 in a faux-7,000-year-old Austrian village are relatively unimportant.

7:51 And for developers, the European and American themes are the perfect short-cut:

7:57 they offer a ready-built architectural template,

8:00 create a spectacle that attracts attention,

8:04 and allow them to capitalize on the idealized image of an affluent “West.”

8:09 Decades of rising home prices conditioned

8:12 a whole generation to see easy, guaranteed returns.

8:16 Every empty field they’ve ever seen was eventually colonized by factories;

8:22 every housing complex soon sold out, so why would these be any different?

8:29 Something similar was happening in less

8:32 desirable third and fourth-tier cities across China.

8:36 Say you’re the mayor of Chenzhou.

8:39 Its population of 4.5 million would make it one

8:42 of the biggest metropolises in Europe or the Americas.

8:46 In China, it’s so overlooked that it’s hard to find video of.

8:52 There are at least 44 larger Chinese cities.

8:56 So, how do you put this relative backwater “on the map?” Well,

9:01 one way is to hand a famous architect a blank check and tell them to go wild.

9:08 Clearly, they understood these instructions.

9:11 China might just be the world’s capital of “weird” architecture.

9:16 There’s a building shaped like a bird in flight,

9:20 a pair of pants, a ring, three men,

9:24 eggs, a mountain range, the moon and the sun,

9:30 an octopus, a flower, spaceship, beehive, and forest.

9:36 You name it and China probably has it.

9:40 As a local bureaucrat,

9:42 your incentives were to drive short-term economic growth and quickly make

9:46 a name for yourself before being rotated to a new city.

9:50 Approving that splashy new project puts your name in the newspaper.

9:55 Besides, you’ll be long gone by the time

9:59 the Orangatang-shaped hospital sits empty and unused.

10:03 In other words, the more outlandish, the better.

10:07 One overzealous official spent one third of his city’s

10:10 entire revenue building a replica of the U.S.

10:13 Capitol to serve as a government office.

10:17 Meaning, Communist Party cadres work every day inside

10:20 an architectural tribute to their country’s greatest competitor.

10:25 How’s that for soft power?

10:27 Of course, when everyone tries to stand out, no one does.

10:32 Inevitably, this ignites a full-blown “weirdness” arms-race.

10:37 Now, to some, this is all just an amusing—

10:40 perhaps even endearing— feature of the Chinese landscape.

10:44 Sometimes you just stumble into a random Stonehenge.

10:48 Better than row after row of dreary Soviet-era high-rises!

10:55 Xi Jinping, however, is not among them.

10:59 After rising to power, Xi saw his mission as correcting for the excesses

11:04 of China’s long reform era— its rampant corruption,

11:09 its uncoordinated waste, and blind, “Western-obsessed” consumerism.

11:14 “Weird” architecture was a symptom of all three.

11:18 And so, in 2014, he “banned” it, in the vague,

11:22 jargon-heavy way Party officials do— by calling

11:26 on cities to “strengthen their cultural confidence”

11:30 and “disseminate contemporary Chinese values.” And just like

11:35 that, China’s “Las Vegas” era was officially over.

11:39 But there’s one place where China’s

11:42 early-2000s penchant for the opulent, the colossal,

11:45 and the garish truly lives on— a sort of living museum of that earlier era.

11:52 About 20 miles away from Hong Kong

11:56 is another “Special Administrative Region” called Macau.

11:59 Macau is one of the most

12:02 densely-populated and most land-deprived cities on earth.

12:05 So, naturally, about 15 years ago, Las Vegas Sands’ Sheldon Adelson—

12:11 then America’s third-richest person— decided it

12:14 would make the perfect place to plop down a brand new, car-centric casino strip.

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12:24 And, like its smaller Vegas counterpart, includes an indoor gondola ride.

12:30 Next door is The Parisian, complete— you guessed it— with an Eiffel Tower.

12:35 It’s one of the most surreal places I’ve ever

12:38 been— a fake Paris in a former Portuguese colony,

12:42 culturally, largely Chinese, but not quite, built by an American billionaire.

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