Oh, yes, and one more thing: Cong is only 17 years old. Still wearing a retainer on her teeth, the long-haired teenager keeps a picture of Hong Kong pop idol Addison in her wallet and carries a pink plastic pacifier in her purse–for those moments, she says, “when I’m really stressed.” What’s to worry about? Her father made a fortune developing property in the northern city of Shenyang. But the sudden riches broke up her parents’ marriage and left Cong feeling lonely, bored and unmotivated. She didn’t get past 10th grade in high school, and now she’s failing several classes at an expensive private college in Shanghai. More often than she likes to admit, Cong skips class to spend her daddy’s cash, salving her loneliness in a lode of luxury goods. “My father always complains that I spend too much,” she says. “But every time I ask for money he just gives me more.”
China’s little emperors–and empresses–are growing up. For the first time in recent Chinese history, there is a generation of kids reaching their 20s with no memory of hardship and loads of money: Generation Cash. Born too late to experience the ravages of the Cultural Revolution, these coddled youth have been weaned on two decades of capitalist revolution, with money, not Mao, as their god. The only children of wealthy businessmen, they carry out their lives in almost complete isolation from China’s gritty realities–shopping, partying, traveling and, yes, doing business on their own terms. Like the coastal areas where most of them live, these youth are symbols of the deep chasm that has emerged between China’s rich and poor. But they are much more: they are also the inheritors of China’s future. What they choose to do with their families’ wealth–the trends they set, the values they embrace, the opportunities they waste–will go a long way toward determining what sort of country China will become.
At first glance China’s privileged children look like any Western elite poised to inherit their country’s future. They go to the best private schools, gaining an advantage that their parents, whose education was interrupted by the Cultural Revolution, never had. They wear Armani or Tommy Hilfiger, not the monotonous blue and gray Mao suits of previous generations. Their headphones blare Britney and Eminem, not propaganda operas. And like kids across the world, their heroes are the fleeting icons of the global entertainment industry, unfettered by conservative Confucian values. So China’s rich kids are selfish, confused and irresponsible. What’s so bad about that? After decades of poverty and rigid control, doesn’t it mean China is finally loosening up?
Well, yes. But China, like these kids, is going through a perilous transition. The country has grown at a frantic pace for the past 20 years. But massive debt, corruption and social inequities threaten to undermine its development. China now needs a generation that will handle this wealth judiciously, with greater respect for the rule of law, the principle of fairness and the idea of freedom. The previous generation of young Chinese flooded Tiananmen Square behind banners exalting the ideals of Western-style democracy. But today’s kids seem content with the way things are. After all, the current system, built on a foundation of corruption and connections (guanxi), has served them just fine. “Capitalism in China is not about a -real market or the rule of law. It is all about bribery, guanxi,” says Zha Jianying, author of the cultural commentary “China Pop.” “And the unfairness is perpetuated by the young elites. All they care about is how to win the game, not whether it should be changed. And that’s not good for China in the long run.”
Guo Caijiang is playing hooky again. The only son of a Ningbo construction magnate is lounging in his hotel suite in Shanghai, smoking his way through a carton of duty-free Marlboros and reveling in his spur-of-the-moment decision to skip a week of school. Rolling in riches for as long as he can remember, Guo, 23, doesn’t seem fazed by the fact that he hasn’t finished ninth grade. Last year he started attending school in Australia, part of a deal he struck with his father in return for more than $50,000 a year in spending money–and, eventually, the family business. Most of his classmates are wealthy Chinese kids, so he’s hardly learned any English. He spends more time driving his gray BMW 325 and indulging his weakness for Armani and Ferragamo. Still, he gets bored easily, which is why he bought a $500 plane ticket and blithely headed to Shanghai for a week of partying. “I’m a little crazy,” Guo admits.
Pampered kids like Guo hardly look like budding revolutionaries. But they could be as much of a threat to China’s social structures as the Tiananmen generation was more than a decade ago. This cohort of coddled kids has discarded many of the Confucian values that have guided the country for millennia–discipline, education, filial piety–without filling the void with anything meaningful or socially redeeming. “Many children these days simply have no sense of responsibility,” says one Beijing-based sociologist. “Sometimes I think we have a disaster just waiting to happen.” The future of an aging China, especially on the coast, will in some ways depend on these rich young Chinese. They set trends for the rest of country. They influence the way government is run. And they will inherit more money than dozens of Chinese generations combined. What happens when such power is untempered by a sense of responsibility?
The freedom to be irresponsible is a new luxury in China, but it’s coming at the expense of education. Most Chinese students still prepare feverishly for their exams, constantly reminded by their parents that a good education is the only route to success. But it’s different for rich kids: they don’t always care so much about school, yet their money and connections still get them preferential treatment. Their parents can afford to send them to one of China’s 50,000 new private schools. In public schools, parents can often pay an extra fee–about $13,000 for three years in one Shanghai high school–to enroll their kids in a special class with the best teachers. But the privileged students rarely try very hard. “It’s really unfair,” says one student whose boyfriend was in the special class. “The rich kids have all the advantages, but they just fool around.”
Fooling around comes easiest for the huge numbers of rich young Chinese being sent abroad to study. Many Chinese students, of course, are attending the best prep schools and universities in Europe and the United States. But the majority, like Guo, are enrolled in finishing schools that cater almost exclusively to rich Chinese. “It’s easy for kids to go bad there because there1 are no parents around,” says Guo, relaxing before an evening of bar-hopping. Tomorrow the mop-haired youth will jet off to a party in Shenzhen. But tonight he’ll be flashing his cash at his favorite club, Park 97. “If you don’t have money, nobody will look at you,” he says. “In China, everything is about money.”
The crowd at park 97 oozes money. Five years ago, when it opened, the tony club attracted a sedate crowd of thirtysomething expatriates. Today the clubbers are, on average, 10 years younger–and more than a third are local Chinese. Look around and you can see young Chinese splashing out some serious dough. At the bar, a young Shanghainese woman–the daughter of a cosmetics exporter–is nursing a $5 gin-and-tonic as she waits for her expat boyfriend. At a front table, two young hipsters from Guangzhou talk about golf lessons over a bottle of expensive Italian wine. When Guo arrives, he will head straight to a VIP room and a bottle of Veuve Clicquot. The 23-year-old high-schooler only wishes he had his BMW to park out front. These rich kids might be nothing special overseas, says Ian Jin, an executive recruiter who returned from the United States two years ago. “But here, they can be kings.”
And sometimes they can act like despots. Every Shanghai resident has a tale about rich young kids cruising in a tinted Mercedes, swaggering into a club and indulging in the most blatant abuses. At one club earlier this year, the son of one of Shanghai’s most influential leaders struck a female club promoter with a bottle. “This guy started being incredibly violent,” recalls the woman, refusing to identify herself or her attacker for fear of retribution. “And then he said: ‘I’m the son of so-and-so. Just try to get me arrested!’ " After spending several days in the hospital, the woman tried to find a lawyer to press charges. But nobody would take the case. They were too scared of his father’s -power, she says.
For China’s older generations such decadence is deeply disturbing. They were brought up to idolize Lei Feng, an everyman soldier singled out by Mao Zedong as a model of selflessness. But the young elite have no role models, so they’re making it up as they go along. Their sense of impunity has been blamed for a sharp upsurge in youth crime, drug use and casual sex–vices that were all but eradicated under the stringent societal norms of Maoist China. “They are the first generation of rich kids, so they must be terribly confused,” says Yue Xiaodong, a psychology professor at City University of Hong Kong who studies mainland youth. “They have nobody to guide them.”
Many rich young Chinese are grasping for anything foreign. Plastic surgery is popular among twentysomething women eager to look Western with wider eyes, higher noses, bigger breasts. Many young men, like 23-year-old Xu Zhe, have acquired the trappings of global youth culture: baggy cargo pants, gray Cat shoes, Tibetan thumb ring and rust-colored dreadlocks. Xu may be instantly recognizable the world over as part of the hip-hop nation, but Chinese peasants wouldn’t have a clue what to make of him. “In cultural outlook, kids these days are closing the gap with the rest of the world,” says Tony Zhang, the owner of Park 97. “But they are widening the gap inside China.”
It is easy to assume that this generation of wealthy Chinese kids is thoroughly Western: they speak English, wear Western clothes and seem mesmerized by all things American. But the young, rich and powerful are often the most fiercely patriotic and, when the occasion calls for it, anti-American. “They may dress the same and look the same [as Americans], but they live in a different world,” says author Zha. “They grow up with a sophisticated understanding of international pop culture, but then they take in whatever the government says without question.” Rich Chinese youth may be cynical about the way the business world operates, but, unlike their parents, they have a remarkable lack of skepticism about their government.
Perhaps that is because, unlike any other, this is a generation without history. Their parents suffered horribly during the Cultural Revolution. Their older friends and relatives were swept up in the tragedy of Tiananmen. But these kids seem unfazed by the past. The strains of “The East Is Red” can still be heard on the streets, but only in the ring-tones of the Nokia mobile phones of youngsters who, instead of believing in a socialist workers’ paradise, long for Skechers shoes. Without the baggage of history, these youth can forge ahead with a self-confidence their parents could never muster. But they are perpetuating a system of political acquiescence and guanxi economics–even as they help break down society’s old value structures.
All over the world, parents use their influence to help their children get ahead. The danger in China, however, is that connections and cash–sometimes in the form of bribes–are often the only determinants of success. And the young elites are the last ones who want to let go of that system: it helps them cut the kind of deals that will make them rich without really trying. Right now, the rest of China envies Generation Cash. But when it becomes clear that wealth doesn’t trickle down to the masses–and that the system is hopelessly stacked against them–there is a risk that the hundreds of millions who don’t have jobs, much less Ferraris, may rise up in protest. “There is growing anger over the polarization of society,” says Stanley Rosen, a China specialist at the University of Southern California. “It could get dangerous if there’s a spark to set people off.”
Back in Plaza 66, Maggie Cong seems a universe away from the knotty social problems facing China. As she strolls through the opulent boutiques, Cong seems comforted by the glittery unreality of the mall. But the teenager cuts a melancholy figure, like an only child roaming through the rooms of a palace looking for something to fill her emptiness. Cong doesn’t like to dwell on her past, and she has given little thought to her future–or to China’s future. But she perks up when she talks about this month’s vacation: a shopping spree in Hong Kong with five friends. “There’s supposed to be a huge sale at the top stores,’’ she says excitedly. With her background, who can blame Cong for seeking fulfillment in a shopping bag? It’s the only escape she knows. But money can’t buy her happiness, just as the indulgences of China’s young elite can’t ensure a prosperous future for China.
