The Bling Dynasty – The Nouveau Riche in China | Hacker News Reader

The Bling Dynasty – The Nouveau Riche in China

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48 pointstomsun39 comments

One of my favourite slang phrases in Chinese is 土豪, for which the closest English equivalent I can find is nouveau riche.

Gold-coloured consumer products (e.g. champagne-coloured iPhone) are described as 土豪金 (金=gold）。On Taobao, this will often appear alongside other colour choices (white, black, silver) described in more plain language.

It's a rather diminutive term for the newly rich. The tone is almost like dirt barons.

So the same way that 'new money' is used to describe newly rich people? (as in "look at his car, you can tell he's 'new money")

If you plug in the chinese into google translate, it comes up as "Tyrant."

The zh wikipedia has an entry, a real hoot under machine translation.

Actually a little different. In chinese, the term "tu hao" can be also used with a humorous context, not entirely critical.

Wealth is a funny thing in China, because it hardly buys you a real lifestyle, as the author already hinted.

I would argue that broke foreign students partying in Shanghai have more fun than local multi millionaires struggling to find stuff to buy and places to go that give them more status and better entertainment than average mid management joe.

If you never thought that getting rich as a way to attain happiness was a trap in the west, then going to China will open your eyes...

This is why they all have an exit strategy--buying real estate in and sending their kids to university in the US, Canada, and ANZ.

It also helps given that those countries don't have extradition treaties with China, so embezzling money in China, sending it abroad with your kid and wife, and then making a last minute escape before you are caught and executed is a good strategy (see naked officials).

The real estate and university thing is more of status symbol than a real exit strategy.

Most wealthy chinese people would not feel comfortable living outside of China due to a lack of language skills, cultural unfamiliarity and a lack of extended family and friends.

Those making the move long term are usually economically motivated and not very old.

The newly wealthy are pretty fascinating. The closest i can think of in the US that would relate to them are professional athletes.

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cm-arcadia-i...

I would suspect in the near future (5-10) years there will be lots of "Antoine Walker" stories coming out of china. The one way to easily go through all your money and have nothing to show for it is to live like a rockstar in the US.

Perhaps, but the Chinese attitude towards money tends to be different [and deeply ingrained over centuries], I think. Broadly speaking, they tend to invest and save --yes, they might invest and save in lousy deals, but the intent is to make money work rather than outright squander it as some movie or athletic stars in the US might. But, who knows, maybe the mindset will breakdown and they will squander it --ie lose it all in places like Macau. Now, for sure, some will go Moscow-nuveau rich style and and waste a lot in gaudy and flashy items but I just think a lower percentage will end up destitute (as say, some lottery winners in NAm might)

seems they are mostly investing in ghost cities property, that will work really well

Right, but what else can they reasonably 'invest' in? Do they have other options? I suppose they can 'sit' on their money. They need to park their money somewhere. People who make money typically didn't make it by idling whatever they started with.

They don't trust their currency, so aim to convert it into anything else they can.

I find this subject of all the new rich in China very interesting. Is there any book or documentary that explains this phenomenon? I don't understand how this happened in China.

The One Hour China Book gives a very brief insight into the mega trends that caused the massive growth there

http://www.amazon.com/One-Hour-China-Book-University/dp/0991...

Red Obsession on Netflix

A country with more than a billion people that is rich in resources and changing from communism to capitalism is bound to produce a number of extremely wealthy people in a short time, especially since chinese people are very entrepreneurial minded.

>There are also 60,000 Chinese people worth at least $200 million—another line of demarcation between being wealthy and being a photon cannon of currency.

Jesus christ, spend your minerals and gas.

That's $12 trillion dollars. 71% of USA GDP. Although I imagine much of that is tied up in speculative real estate which is on its way down in value.

As long as China continues producing more rich people, it isn't going down in value any time soon. It has no mortgage, and is completely detached from the American market.

Until China introduces a property tax to get all that unused property [1] in use working for the economy. And a lot of people have borrowed from banks, family, and loan sharks to speculate in real estate; the landing won't be as soft as the wumao want you to believe.

[1] 3-40% of all apartments in Beijing aren't even renovated, and that is supposed to be a first tier hot market.

Too much of the economy relies on the already shaky real estatemarket for this to happen in the near future imo. A sales tax on third properties and beyond was introduced in Shanghai to curb speculation and couples simply divorced or used straw men to avoid having to pay it.

The straight up property tax (per property, no exceptions) will be added at some point. Municipalities can't make so much money by selling land anymore, and the central government doesn't kick back enough tax revenue. Not only that, but they have committed to eventually providing social services to migrants, like you know, schooling for their kids. That has to be paid for someway.

But they will definitely hold off for now, a property tax would cause huge devaluations in property prices inflated by the lack of one. But if we get a crash anyways, it will be easy just to add it at the bottom. The question is what is next, with transaction reaching a very low bottom to keep prices from falling, we seem to be in for a long bout of stagnation which will drag down the larger economy even more than if a crash would just happen and we could be over with it.

Local government and companies have borrowed way too much based on real estate value that a crash would be allowed to happen based on what I have read, as it would have much broader implications than in the US.

Rents in Shanghai have remained mostly stagnant from what I've seen for the last 2 years, so it's good for tenants.

Rents at the high end are completely stagnant, which is why those new apartments aren't being renovated. Not having a property tax leads to hoarding and not putting property to productive use, which screws everyone but the princelings.

They've already announced plans to roll out the tax "as early as this year":

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/internatio...

We might mean different things. I meant Chinese money in US real estate.

Thankfully the US has a property tax, so they have to put the property to use, which is good for the economy, at least.

wat? china is all borrowed money after 2008

http://www.cnbc.com/id/102066916

The $200M figure is a typo. The article's source lists 64500 people with >= 100M RMB ($16M) in 2013.

http://up.hurun.net/Humaz/201312/20131218145315550.pdf [Page 9]

Money doesn't buy taste, clearly.

... ugh...

Maybe not, but money does dictate what "taste" means.

Not really. "Luxury" though.