Lost on Planet China: One Man's Attempt to Understand the World's Most Mystifying Nation (18 page)

I had gotten all crazy and reserved a room at the Grand Hyatt Shanghai, the world’s highest hotel, located on floors fifty-four to eighty-seven of the Jin Mao Tower. I figured that if I was going to look for money this would be an excellent place to find it. Then, as I handed over my credit card at the check-in counter on the fifty-fourth floor, it occurred to me that this was a profoundly addled way of thinking. I wasn’t going to find money here. I was going to go broke here. I hadn’t stayed in a hotel quite so august since my days as a consultant to the World Bank, when I traveled as the Official Carrier of the PowerPoint Projector. The Grand Hyatt is the sort of hotel where, if you’re not wearing a suit, you feel a little sloppy, a heretofore unexperienced sensation in China. It is very likely that I was the first guest to wander into the lobby with a backpack. It is also the only place in China where I felt acutely self-conscious in seeking the customary 50-percent-plus discount off the listed price. And that was a very odd sensation indeed. By now I was hardwired for bargaining, and when vendors tried to overcharge me, the dumb
laowai,
I’d haggle with glee. But not here, deep inside the Grand Hyatt Shanghai, where everything was hushed and graceful, and guests exuded an overwhelming sense of richness that precluded them from even caring how many zeros there were on their hotel bill.

I hesitated before taking the key. There was still time to find a room a trifle less lavish than this, but then they offered an upgrade to a Super Deluxe Executive Suite at absolutely no additional cost and I thought, What the hell, go on, spend a night living like a Master of the Universe. I took the key, swiped it into the Guests Only elevator, and proceeded upward to the seventy-fourth floor, where I found my room, a sanctuary in the sky with soft woody colors and a top-of-the-line king-sized bed and a bathroom that evoked an extremely weird sensation of desire. I wanted this bathroom, this haven of chrome—no, not chrome, platinum probably—with the multinozzled immersion shower. But most impressive was the view, the kind of view that left my jaw scraping against the floor. There below me, far, far below, swirled the Huangpu River, choked with boats of every variation, and across was the Bund, evoking the Shanghai of yesteryear when the city was famed as the Whore of the Orient (now, there’s a moniker), and beyond that the thousands of buildings, the swarming immensity of Shanghai, just beginning to light up a crepuscular dusk. Even in my hermetically sealed Super Deluxe Executive Suite, I could feel the intense drive and pluck of the city, and compelling as the city was, more compelling was the exorbitant amount of money I was spending for this view, and I figured for that kind of money I better have a little look-see at the rest of the hotel.

If you ever happen to find yourself on the fifty-sixth floor of the Jin Mao Tower, make a point of wandering toward the middle of the floor, where you’ll find a lobby-type bar and a bunch of tables thoughtfully spread out to give businesspeople—and they’re all businesspeople, mostly of the male persuasion—enough room to conduct deals and discuss strategies without having solo travelers in jeans eavesdrop on them, and then cautiously look up. And I do mean cautiously if you are at all susceptible to vertigo. Here you’ll find a staggering thirty-story atrium, and if you’re unprepared it’s very possible to feel a sort of reverse vertigo, this sudden overwhelming awareness of an immense void. Sort of like being in a
Star Trek
movie, but with better lighting. Then, if you’re curious to know what weeks of nothing but vividly flavorful Chinese food will do to your taste buds, head on over to The Grill, the hotel’s Western restaurant, where every seat offers a window view of the shimmering city beyond the glass.

The restaurant was filled with businesspeople—Chinese, American, European, Japanese, Arab—and sitting in an opulent restaurant in bustling Shanghai is to be reminded of just how much money there is sloshing around China today. The government is sitting on a roughly $1.4 trillion reserve, and if you think China is just going to idly rest on a big pile of dollars while the U.S. government does everything possible to depreciate the dollar, you’re wrong. The Chinese government started a sovereign fund, and in its first big move bought a stake in Blackstone, the private equity firm, which together with hedge funds is representative of the parts of Wall Street that have gone feral. They did this not merely to make some money—which they haven’t since share prices in Blackstone have tumbled more than 50 percent—but to learn how the sharks operated in international finance, which is an interesting skill set for the Chinese Politburo to learn.

Of course, it’s not only the government that sits on wealth in China, though they do have their hands in an awful lot of it. There are now more than a hundred billionaires in the country itself. And it’s no wonder. Forty percent of all goods imported by the United States comes from China, and the United States, of course, is hardly China’s only customer. More than $500 billion of foreign investment has found a home in China, and it has finally become the massive consumer market that businesspeople have been salivating over for decades. There are more than 500 million cell phones in China, and it’s now the second-biggest market in the world for cars. Ditto computers.

And there are stock markets. Two, to be exact—in Shenzhen, near Hong Kong, and Shanghai. The Chinese, among the most prolific savers in the world, have more than 17 trillion yuan in household savings. Investors, however, are permitted to invest only on the domestic exchanges, which they do with manic glee; 69,000 people open brokerage accounts
per day
in China. Indeed, pawnshops have even started accepting houses and apartments as collateral for loans. The thrill of investing has become so pervasive that the government had to pass a law making it illegal for high school students to invest in shares, which they’d been doing with about the same measured restraint typical of sixteen-year-olds everywhere. But you can hardly blame the Chinese for throwing everything they have into the stock market. In 2007, the market rose 97 percent. In 2006, it rose 130 percent. Few markets in the world have ever approached the gains of the stock market in China.

Real estate, too, has experienced a similar manic appreciation. “Do you see that building there?” said the waitress, pointing at an apartment building far below us. “It’s more than 20,000 yuan per square meter.”

“Really,” I said, mulling the Tuna Tartare. “That’s terrible. How do people afford it?”

“Its too expensive. It’s very difficult for most people. I think it is mostly overseas Chinese who are buying.”

She was wrong, it turns out. Eighty percent of homes in China’s cities are owned by private citizens, and just as in the U.S., some have turned to property flipping. But while in the U.S. that bubble has burst, leaving a grim trail of foreclosures and bankruptcies, in China the real estate bubble has continued merrily along, with some cities, like Shanghai, experiencing a doubling in home values every year. As with the stock market, investors have convinced themselves that nothing bad will be allowed to happen, no crashes, no depreciation, until the Olympic Games have passed, and so meanwhile the party continues.

As I finished my steak, which was a very good steak, nicely marbled, seared just so, and to my evolving taste buds, which had adjusted to Chinese fare, completely flavorless, I wondered if it was at all possible to lose money in China. And then I considered the bill, which was hideous. I looked around the room, listened to the businessmen in murmured conversation, and realized that there was probably just one person in this room who was not coming out ahead from his stay in the Jin Mao Tower. But I consoled myself and figured that if all went well, my wife would never learn just how much I squandered in one evening in Shanghai—unless, of course, I decided to write about it. (So, Honey. It’s like this…)

The yin and yang of my budget had been thrown into disarray, and so to restore cosmic balance to my fiscal world, I moved across the river the next day and into a dilapidated hotel. Drunks in the lobby? Check. Dirty green shag carpet in the room? Check. Seat missing from toilet? Check. Bed that looked like the scene of a gruesome crime scene? Check. View of trash-strewn alley? Check. Harmony was returning to my fiscal world. True, it was the kind of hotel with the cracked walls and the chipped paint that suggested sinister things were afoot, but it was cheap, and even more important for my interests, it was well-located, within walking distance of the Bund, which is where I found myself on one gloriously crisp, radiant sunny morning.

No, I jest. The air was breathtakingly foul and I could only assume that for the people of Shanghai sunshine was now nothing more than a dim memory sometimes recalled in elegiac detail by an elder old enough to recall the Qing Dynasty. But still, the swirling clouds of particulate matter did little to deter my enthusiasm during my stroll on the Bund. This little corner of China across the Huangpu River from Pudong and extending through the leafy tangle of villas and avenues in the French Concession is quite likely the easiest place for a Westerner to feel at home in China. This is, of course, because it was built by Westerners. Before they arrived, Shanghai was a sleepy port city of little importance, but its status changed considerably after China lost the First Opium War in 1842 and the city was opened up to the barbarians, who sought to re-create a splendid European burg of Art Deco and Neo-Classical edifices. The fifty-two buildings that comprise the Bund are reflective of the apogee of that era in the early nineteenth century, when the city was quite likely the very coolest place to be for an expat. It wasn’t suffused merely with British, American, and French seekers of wealth and adventure, but also with those displaced by the galloping hoofs of history, mostly White Russians and European Jews who had discovered how very quickly things can change. This was an era of intrigue and champagne, when fortunes were won and lost, gambling dens thrived, and so, too, prostitution, and an Englishman could stroll along the river and dismissively wave off the locals as nothing more than coolies. Things changed, of course. There was the war. And then, in 1949, red flags flew over Shanghai, too, as Mao Zedong marched into power. Somehow, Mao managed to make glittering Shanghai both bland and terrifying, which is a tricky feat to pull off.

Today, Shanghai is no longer bland, of course. There’s a transcendental hipness to the city. It’s a happening place. There is groove music. There are lounges. And spaces. There are restaurants, like M on the Bund, that rival any restaurant anywhere. It is the sort of place where, if I were a restless, unattached, childless man of twenty-some years with lungs of steel, I’d perhaps make it a point to learn the Shanghainese dialect of the Wu variation of the Chinese language, then hightail it pronto for this city on the coast. Because there is action here, even on the Bund, where stores line the cobbled streets offering the latest from Givenchy and Hermès, and bankers can be seen in slick suits and skinny ties driving BMWs, the 7 Series, on their way to lunch at Jean Georges.

But I was just a visitor in Shanghai, and as I viewed the goings-on on the Bund from the River Path across the road, I experienced exciting first-time-visitor encounters with the path’s local denizens.

“You want Rolex?” asked a woman, displaying her wares on her arms.

“A Rolex? Really?”

“It is very beautiful.”

“Yes. It sure is beautiful.”

“I give you special price. Hundred dollars. Good price.”

“Gosh. That sounds like a real bargain. But tell you what. Let me help you today.” I showed her my traveling watch. “Let me give you a special price—say, $50. It is very beautiful. See, it even has Mickey Mouse on it. It’s very valuable.”

She laughed and pulled out a pen. “Mont Blanc. Good price.”

I pulled out my pen. “Bic. Very good quality. Made in China. Ten dollars for you.”

This was fun for the first three Rolex sellers, but then I grew bored and instead I replied to their inquiries with the all-time most useful Chinese words I had yet learned in China:
bu yao.
I don’t want it. But if I’d had a pressing need for a Rolex, I now knew where to find one. Of course, the watches on offer here were poor imitations, but if I knew what I was doing, and I didn’t, shopping in China being one of those things best left for professionals, I have no doubt that somewhere in Shanghai I’d be able to find a top-of-the-line, can’t-tell-the-difference genuine imitation Rolex of sufficient craftsmanship that not even a watchmaker in Basel, Switzerland, would be able to tell them apart. The Chinese not only produce mountains of fake products, they also produce mountains of very good fake products. And the aspirations of fake-product producers had moved far higher than watches to include such things as, incredibly, cars. The Chinese automaker Shuanghuan Automobile even went so far as to produce a knockoff of the BMW X5, an SUV, and if you think they felt a little shameful about shamelessly copying a BMW, you’d be wrong. They unveiled the car at the Frankfurt Motor Show, just up the autobahn from the home of BMW. Now, that’s gumption.