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(Updates previous version of this story.)
By Christopher Beam
(Bloomberg) -- Emerging from a nightclub near Workers’
Stadium in Beijing at 1:30 a.m. on a Saturday in June, Mikael
Hveem ordered an Uber. He selected the cheapest car option and
was surprised when the vehicle that rolled up was a dark blue
Maserati. The driver, a young, baby-faced Chinese man,
introduced himself as Jason. Hveem asked him why he was driving
an Uber—he obviously didn’t need the cash. Jason said he did it
to meet people, especially girls. Driving around late at night
in Beijing’s nightclub district, he figured he’d find the kind
of woman who would be charmed by a clean-cut 22-year-old in a
sports car.
When I heard this story from a friend who had also been in
the car, I asked for the driver’s contact info. I introduced
myself to Jason over WeChat, China’s popular mobile app, and
asked for an interview. He replied immediately with a screen
shot that included photos of women in various states of undress.
“Best hookers in bj
,” he added. I explained there had been a
misunderstanding, and we arranged to have coffee.
When we met at a cafe in Beijing’s business district, it
was clear that Jason, whose surname is Zhang, was different from
other young Chinese. He had a job, at a media company that
produced reality TV shows, but didn’t seem especially busy. He’d
studied in the U.S., but at a golf academy in Florida, and he’d
dropped out after two years. His father was the head of a major
HR company, and his mother was a government official. He wore a
$5,500 IWC watch because, he said, he’d lost his expensive one.
I asked him how much money he had. “I don’t know,” he said.
“More than I can spend.” So this was it: I had found, in the
wild, one of the elusive breed known in China as the fuerdai, or
“second-generation rich.”
As portrayed in the local press, fuerdai are to China what
Paris Hilton was to the U.S. a decade ago, only less tasteful.
Every few months there’s a fuerdai scandal, whether it’s a photo
of a woman about to set fire to a pile of 100-yuan ($16) notes;
members of the much derided Sports Car Club posing beside their
Lamborghinis; or someone pulling a gun during a street race. In
2013 reports of a fuerdai sex party at the beach resort of Sanya
provoked a nationwide finger-wag. Two prominent rich kids got
into a public arms race over who had the bigger stash: The
widely despised socialite Guo Meimei posted photos online of
herself with 5 million yuan worth of casino chips; her rival
responded with a screen shot of his bank statement, which
appeared to contain 3.7 billion yuan. (Guo was sentenced to five
years in prison for running a gambling den.) Recently, the son
of Wang Jianlin, a real estate mogul and the richest man in
China, trolled the nation by posting a photo of his dog wearing
two gold Apple Watches, one on each forepaw. Fuerdai outrages
occasionally feature government intrigue, such as a 2012 Ferrari
crash in Beijing involving two young women and the son of a
high-level official, all of whom were at least partially naked
when they were thrown from the car. The man’s father, a top aide
to then-president Hu Jintao, was later arrested and charged with
corruption.
The fuerdai (pronounced foo-arr-dye) aren’t just an
embarrassment. The Communist Party seems to consider them an
economic or even political threat. President Xi Jinping himself
spoke out this year, advising the second generation to “think
about the source of their wealth and how to behave after
becoming affluent.” An article published by the United Front
Work Department, the bureau that manages relations between the
party and nonparty elite, warned: “They know only how to show
off their wealth but don’t know how to create wealth.” Some
local governments have taken steps to reeducate their wealthy
elite. In June, according to Beijing Youth Daily, 70 heirs to
major Chinese companies attended lectures on filial piety and
the role of traditional values in business.
While Xi’s anticorruption campaign has curbed some of the
most outrageous wealth-flaunting, the gap between rich and poor
is still evident to anyone on a Beijing street weaving between
fruit vendor carts and black Audis. Now, as the economy slows
and the party looks for scapegoats, the fuerdai are in the
precarious position of having to justify their existence and
show that China’s future leaders aren’t just money-igniting,
Ferrari-wrecking layabouts. Not all of them, anyway.
After a few weeks of nosing around, I persuaded a crew of
fuerdai to invite me to one of their occasional dinners. When I
arrived, I wondered if I’d come to the wrong place. It was an
outdoor barbecue spot in northern Beijing, with locals sitting
on stools so low they were almost squatting, swilling Yanjing
beer and chewing on lamb skewers. Identifying the
centimillionaire scions among the riffraff was difficult. The
fuerdai trickled in, dressed the same as everyone else in the
restaurant—in tank tops, button-downs, jeans, flip-flops. The
only giveaway was the liquor they brought: French Champagne and
a bottle of Maotai, the choicest brand of baijiu. Martin Hang,
the gregarious organizer of the dinner and editor of a magazine
called Fortune Generation(no relation to the U.S. publication),
introduced everyone. The dozen guests included Wang Daqi, 30,
son of a famous business consultant, who had recently written a
book about rich kids in China; Albert Tang, 20, a philosophy
student at Bard whose father runs a major Beijing publishing
house; and Sophia Cheng, 27, the only woman in the group. It
still wasn’t clear to me what threshold of wealth one needed to
exceed to be fuerdai, but Cheng assured me she qualified. (Hang
disagreed.) Her parents had given her a vast amount—more than
100 million yuan, she said—which she invested in film, mobile-
gaming, and meat-processing companies.
Drinking began in earnest before the food arrived. We
toasted as a group, then in pairs, then in subgroups, then in
pairs again, until everyone was so shattered that it felt like
we’d known each other forever. Conversation volleyed between
business and gossip. One member of the group was dubbed the
Champagne Prince for his ordering habits at clubs. Another
attendee, Lin Xin, 30, talked up his company’s technology for
authenticating antiques. Someone joked about how wannabe rich
kids would go to clubs and rent bottles of expensive liquor to
display on their table to make it look like they had money.
(“But what if a girl wants to drink it?” another person
wondered.) Cheng mentioned that she had a few spare chickens in
her car; did anyone want to try some? Tang, the philosophy
student, pulled me aside and asked what I knew about the
Freemasons.
At the center of it all was Hang, who, as editor of Fortune
Generation and a prominent member of the Relay China Elite
Association, a nonprofit that serves as a social club for the
second-generation rich, functions as a connector among China’s
children of privilege. Hang, 31, explained how Relay works.
“We’re trying to help the second generation do better together,”
he said, speaking carefully and with precision, even after many
drinks. Founded in 2008, Relay was created to help fuerdai meet
other fuerdai, who might be facing similar challenges of wealth.
There’s an initiation fee of 200,000 yuan, and members must
prove that their family businesses pay at least 50 million yuan
in annual taxes. At forums held several times a year, the heirs
listen to lectures on topics such as how to minimize taxes or
maximize profit (“All legal stuff,” one member assured me) and
visit each other’s companies. “Most of the time the forum is
very boring,” Hang said. He rolled out the magazine in 2011,
hoping to promote a more positive image of fuerdai than the
decadent wastrels usually portrayed in the media. It was a
rebranding: Relay’s members dropped the fu (“wealthy”) from
fuerdai and started to refer to themselves using a new term,
chuangerdai, which means “second-generation entrepreneurs,” or
just erdai, “second generation.” Each month the magazine cover
features a different child of privilege, usually male, wearing a
suit and striking a casually authoritative pose—for the July
issue, while leaning on an Audi. (The two-page ad immediately
following the cover is also for Audi.)
“They know only how to show off their wealth but don't know
how to create wealth”
The purpose of the organization, Hang said, is to encourage
second-generation kids to take over the family business or at
least play a role in its management. Such companies are crucial
to the Chinese economy, he said: Not only do they make up 85
percent of non-state-owned enterprises, they also put long-term
success ahead of quarterly results.
The downside is that family-run companies are, well, run by
families, and most kids in China don’t relish the idea of
working alongside their parents. Hang took issue with the
statistic, released by Shanghai Jiaotong University in 2012,
that 82 percent of second-generation heirs aren’t willing to
take over their family business. He didn’t dispute the data so
much as the semantics: “They aren’t willing to do it, but they
still have to.”
It’s a distinction that Hang knows well. His father’s
advertising agency, started in 1993, is one of the largest of
its kind in Jiangxi province. After graduating from college,
Hang avoided the agency. He studied financial management in the
Netherlands and bought the rights to Norron, a Norse god-themed
online game. He was cocky about his business acumen. “I thought
I was awesome,” he said. “I was a fuerdai—I wasn’t interested in
talking to other people.” When the game failed to take off, Hang
decided to join his father’s company. “I had a choice,” he said.
“I could do something else, but it would make my parents work
very hard. They never said I had to, but I thought it was
necessary.”
All fuerdai face a version of the same problem: They have
everything but the ability to surpass their own parents.
Whatever they achieve will be credited to their family, not to
themselves. Hang described always being introduced as “the son
of Mr. Hang.” When Wang, the author, found a publisher for his
book, he didn’t know if they wanted to publish it because it was
good, or because of his famous father. “People will always say
your only competence is that you were reincarnated into a good
family,” he said. He told me about the difficulty of explaining
the burdens of inheritance to the nonwealthy. “They never
understand—‘Why are you in pain?’ ” said Wang. “I say it’s not
relevant. The amount of wealth doesn’t determine how happy you
are. You can only know by experiencing it.”
It’s no surprise that most fuerdai, after summering in Bali
and wintering in the Alps, reading philosophy at Oxford and
getting MBAs from Stanford, are reluctant to take over the
family toothpaste cap factory. Ping Fan, 36, who serves as
executive deputy director of Relay, moved to Shanghai to start
his own investment firm rather than work at his father’s real
estate company in Liaoning province. He picked Shanghai, he
said, “because it was far from my family.” After graduating from
Columbia University, Even Jiang, 28, briefly considered joining
her mother’s diamond import business, but they disagreed about
the direction of the company. Instead, she went to work at
Merrill Lynch, then returned to Shanghai to start a concierge
service, inspired by the American Express service she used when
living in Manhattan. Liu Jiawen, 32, whose parents own a
successful clothing company in Hunan province, tried to start
her own clothing line after graduating. “I wanted to show I
could do it on my own,” she said. The company failed.
Along with riches, fuerdai often inherit a surplus of
emotional trauma. The first generation of Chinese entrepreneurs
came of age during a time that rewarded callousness. “They were
the generation of the Cultural Revolution,” said Wang. “During
that time, there was no humanity.” His grandfather, the
principal of a middle school in Guizhou province, was humiliated
by Red Guards. “They were raised cruelly—there was no mercy. It
was survival of the fittest.” Many fuerdai have their parents’
same coldness, Wang said: “They’re really hard to be friends
with.”
Zhang, the Uber driver, was sent to boarding school
starting in kindergarten, even though his parents lived only a
short distance from the school. Perhaps to compensate for their
inattention, they gave him everything he wanted, including
hundreds of toy cars. Last Christmas he bought himself the
Maserati. “It’s like their childhood has not ended,” Wang said
of his fellow rich kids. “Their childhood was not fully
satisfied, so they always want to prolong the process of being
children.” Thanks to China’s one-child policy, most fuerdai grew
up without siblings. That’s why so many travel in packs on
Saturday nights, Wang said. “They want to be taken care of. They
want to be loved.”
For Zhang, partying is a way of staving off boredom. He
used to go out clubbing five nights a week. “If I didn’t go, I
couldn’t sleep,” he said. He doesn’t lack for companionship, he
added. Two or three times a week, he’ll hire a high-end sex
worker—a “booty call,” in his words—for $1,000 or more. Zhang
prefers paying for sex to flirting with a girl under the
pretense that he might date her. “This way is more direct,” he
said. “I think this is a way of respecting women.” But some
nights, sitting at home alone, he scrolls through the contacts
on his phone only to reach the bottom without finding anyone he
wants to call. When we first spoke, he said he had a girlfriend
of three years who treated him well, but that he didn’t love
her. “You’re the first person I’ve told that to,” he said.
Most fuerdai don’t talk about their problems so openly.
“They have trust issues,” said Wayne Chen, 32, a second-
generation investor from Shanghai. “They need a place to talk.
They need a group.” Relay offers a setting in which they can
speak honestly, without having to pretend. “It’s similar to a
rehab center,” he said.
In July, Jiang noticed that business at a barbecue
restaurant she owns in Shanghai was slower than usual. “It was
only half of the crowd,” she said. The stock market had been
falling since June and was down 38 percent from its peak by the
end of the summer. Over dinner at the restaurant, I asked Jiang
and Chen, who are a couple, as well as Hang, if fuerdai had felt
the pain of the market crash. “Of course,” Jiang said. “A lot of
their family companies are listed.” She herself had bought
stocks, she said, but pulled out when the market got too bumpy.
Chen said his family money was invested in a “risk-averse way,”
much of it in fixed-income assets and funds of funds.
Still, the volatility—and more important, the government’s
clumsy response to it—signaled a deeper discord within China’s
slowing economy, which affects the fuerdai as much as anyone.
Raising money is tougher than before, said Jiang. Hang said the
slowdown has hurt ad sales at the magazine, particularly from
real estate companies.
Many fuerdai have moved money overseas—Boston Consulting
Group put the amount of Chinese money invested abroad at $450
billion in 2013—often with the goal of gaining foreign
citizenship. A survey conducted in 2013 found that 64 percent of
Chinese high-net-worth individuals had emigrated or wanted to
emigrate overseas. I asked Hang, Chen, and Jiang if fuerdai
worry about their money. “Some do,” Hang said. “His dad sent him
to the U.S.” He laughed and pointed at Chen, who is now an
American citizen. Hang, who is married and has a 4-year-old son,
said he hasn’t ruled out emigrating.
It’s not just China’s stock market drop that makes fuerdai
jittery. “It’s society, too,” said Chen. “Like the Occupy Wall
Street protests.” There’s always been a tendency in Chinese
society to “hate the rich,” Hang said. It’s the same sentiment
that fueled the Cultural Revolution, and was once practically
the Communist Party’s mission statement. (Emphasis on “was.”)
Exacerbating the problem, most fuerdai don’t mix much with
the working classes. “When we were children, we went to the best
schools, so we didn’t encounter a lot of poor people,” Hang
said. “This is very dangerous for society.” Relay is therefore
planning to start a program fostering ties between fuerdai and
children from the countryside. It also organizes charity drives.
After a chemical factory exploded in Tianjin in August, killing
more than 100 people, its members donated 1.5 million yuan
through the local government. To hear Hang explain it,
philanthropy is about more than just social responsibility—it’s
about social stability.
That said, when I asked Jiang if she thought inequality was
a problem in China, she was ambivalent. “I don’t know,” she
said. “There are two groups of poor people. One is, you don’t
work hard. You deserve to be poor because you don’t work hard.
Second is, you work hard but can’t succeed. I think we should
help the second group of people. … There’s a saying, jiu ji bu
jiu pin—‘We’ll help you if you have an emergency, but we cannot
help you if you’re poor.’ ”
The search for meaning is arguably harder for fuerdai than
it is for most people
One day this summer, at the urging of a friend, Wang
decided to call his father and tell him he loved him. Wang
senior picked up the phone. “I love you, Dad,” Daqi said. There
was a pause. “Are you drunk?” his father asked. Wang told this
story at a gathering at his father’s complex on a Friday night
in August. The guests were friends he had met through
Lifespring, a self-help company that, with introductory classes
costing upward of $1,000, caters largely to fuerdai. (The
original Lifespring was the subject of numerous lawsuits in the
U.S. in the 1980s and ’90s, including charges of wrongful death,
and went out of business in 1998.) Wang said the group has
helped him reconcile his feelings about his father and has also
provided the support and community he was unable to find at,
say, the club.
With instant gratification never more than a credit card
swipe away, the search for meaning is arguably harder for
fuerdai than it is for most people. Some, like Jiang and Wang,
feel most purposeful when deviating from their parents’ path.
For others, returning to the family business is, to their
surprise, a source of satisfaction. Liu said she’s glad she took
over her family’s clothing company because it made her parents
happy—a sentiment her former rebellious self would probably have
scoffed at.
Not everyone has discovered a purpose. Zhang, the Uber
driver, said his job at the TV production company is hardly his
ideal career. But he’s not sure what is. “As a kid, I had a lot
of dreams,” he said when we met up at the cafe near his office.
“I wanted to be a golfer or a race car driver or a doctor,
something like that. … But when you get older, you see more, and
you see that some goals are just a dream.” He lit up a
cigarette—now illegal indoors in Beijing—barely casting a glance
to see if a waiter would stop him. Zhang never had any
limitations, which was perhaps itself a limitation. “I don’t
really have a plan,” he said. “Probably it’s a sad thing, but
it’s the truth.” When I asked him if he’s happy, he said it’s
all a question of attitude. “You can find a million reasons to
be sad,” he said, “but you only have to find one reason to be
happy. Every day I find one.” I asked him what today’s reason
was. “Today, I meet you,” he said. “It’s a happy thing.”
To contact the author of this story:
Christopher Beam in at jcbeam@gmail.com
To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Nick Summers at nsummers1@bloomberg.net
By Christopher Beam
(Bloomberg) -- Emerging from a nightclub near Workers’
Stadium in Beijing at 1:30 a.m. on a Saturday in June, Mikael
Hveem ordered an Uber. He selected the cheapest car option and
was surprised when the vehicle that rolled up was a dark blue
Maserati. The driver, a young, baby-faced Chinese man,
introduced himself as Jason. Hveem asked him why he was driving
an Uber—he obviously didn’t need the cash. Jason said he did it
to meet people, especially girls. Driving around late at night
in Beijing’s nightclub district, he figured he’d find the kind
of woman who would be charmed by a clean-cut 22-year-old in a
sports car.
When I heard this story from a friend who had also been in
the car, I asked for the driver’s contact info. I introduced
myself to Jason over WeChat, China’s popular mobile app, and
asked for an interview. He replied immediately with a screen
shot that included photos of women in various states of undress.
“Best hookers in bj
,” he added. I explained there had been amisunderstanding, and we arranged to have coffee.
When we met at a cafe in Beijing’s business district, it
was clear that Jason, whose surname is Zhang, was different from
other young Chinese. He had a job, at a media company that
produced reality TV shows, but didn’t seem especially busy. He’d
studied in the U.S., but at a golf academy in Florida, and he’d
dropped out after two years. His father was the head of a major
HR company, and his mother was a government official. He wore a
$5,500 IWC watch because, he said, he’d lost his expensive one.
I asked him how much money he had. “I don’t know,” he said.
“More than I can spend.” So this was it: I had found, in the
wild, one of the elusive breed known in China as the fuerdai, or
“second-generation rich.”
As portrayed in the local press, fuerdai are to China what
Paris Hilton was to the U.S. a decade ago, only less tasteful.
Every few months there’s a fuerdai scandal, whether it’s a photo
of a woman about to set fire to a pile of 100-yuan ($16) notes;
members of the much derided Sports Car Club posing beside their
Lamborghinis; or someone pulling a gun during a street race. In
2013 reports of a fuerdai sex party at the beach resort of Sanya
provoked a nationwide finger-wag. Two prominent rich kids got
into a public arms race over who had the bigger stash: The
widely despised socialite Guo Meimei posted photos online of
herself with 5 million yuan worth of casino chips; her rival
responded with a screen shot of his bank statement, which
appeared to contain 3.7 billion yuan. (Guo was sentenced to five
years in prison for running a gambling den.) Recently, the son
of Wang Jianlin, a real estate mogul and the richest man in
China, trolled the nation by posting a photo of his dog wearing
two gold Apple Watches, one on each forepaw. Fuerdai outrages
occasionally feature government intrigue, such as a 2012 Ferrari
crash in Beijing involving two young women and the son of a
high-level official, all of whom were at least partially naked
when they were thrown from the car. The man’s father, a top aide
to then-president Hu Jintao, was later arrested and charged with
corruption.
The fuerdai (pronounced foo-arr-dye) aren’t just an
embarrassment. The Communist Party seems to consider them an
economic or even political threat. President Xi Jinping himself
spoke out this year, advising the second generation to “think
about the source of their wealth and how to behave after
becoming affluent.” An article published by the United Front
Work Department, the bureau that manages relations between the
party and nonparty elite, warned: “They know only how to show
off their wealth but don’t know how to create wealth.” Some
local governments have taken steps to reeducate their wealthy
elite. In June, according to Beijing Youth Daily, 70 heirs to
major Chinese companies attended lectures on filial piety and
the role of traditional values in business.
While Xi’s anticorruption campaign has curbed some of the
most outrageous wealth-flaunting, the gap between rich and poor
is still evident to anyone on a Beijing street weaving between
fruit vendor carts and black Audis. Now, as the economy slows
and the party looks for scapegoats, the fuerdai are in the
precarious position of having to justify their existence and
show that China’s future leaders aren’t just money-igniting,
Ferrari-wrecking layabouts. Not all of them, anyway.
After a few weeks of nosing around, I persuaded a crew of
fuerdai to invite me to one of their occasional dinners. When I
arrived, I wondered if I’d come to the wrong place. It was an
outdoor barbecue spot in northern Beijing, with locals sitting
on stools so low they were almost squatting, swilling Yanjing
beer and chewing on lamb skewers. Identifying the
centimillionaire scions among the riffraff was difficult. The
fuerdai trickled in, dressed the same as everyone else in the
restaurant—in tank tops, button-downs, jeans, flip-flops. The
only giveaway was the liquor they brought: French Champagne and
a bottle of Maotai, the choicest brand of baijiu. Martin Hang,
the gregarious organizer of the dinner and editor of a magazine
called Fortune Generation(no relation to the U.S. publication),
introduced everyone. The dozen guests included Wang Daqi, 30,
son of a famous business consultant, who had recently written a
book about rich kids in China; Albert Tang, 20, a philosophy
student at Bard whose father runs a major Beijing publishing
house; and Sophia Cheng, 27, the only woman in the group. It
still wasn’t clear to me what threshold of wealth one needed to
exceed to be fuerdai, but Cheng assured me she qualified. (Hang
disagreed.) Her parents had given her a vast amount—more than
100 million yuan, she said—which she invested in film, mobile-
gaming, and meat-processing companies.
Drinking began in earnest before the food arrived. We
toasted as a group, then in pairs, then in subgroups, then in
pairs again, until everyone was so shattered that it felt like
we’d known each other forever. Conversation volleyed between
business and gossip. One member of the group was dubbed the
Champagne Prince for his ordering habits at clubs. Another
attendee, Lin Xin, 30, talked up his company’s technology for
authenticating antiques. Someone joked about how wannabe rich
kids would go to clubs and rent bottles of expensive liquor to
display on their table to make it look like they had money.
(“But what if a girl wants to drink it?” another person
wondered.) Cheng mentioned that she had a few spare chickens in
her car; did anyone want to try some? Tang, the philosophy
student, pulled me aside and asked what I knew about the
Freemasons.
At the center of it all was Hang, who, as editor of Fortune
Generation and a prominent member of the Relay China Elite
Association, a nonprofit that serves as a social club for the
second-generation rich, functions as a connector among China’s
children of privilege. Hang, 31, explained how Relay works.
“We’re trying to help the second generation do better together,”
he said, speaking carefully and with precision, even after many
drinks. Founded in 2008, Relay was created to help fuerdai meet
other fuerdai, who might be facing similar challenges of wealth.
There’s an initiation fee of 200,000 yuan, and members must
prove that their family businesses pay at least 50 million yuan
in annual taxes. At forums held several times a year, the heirs
listen to lectures on topics such as how to minimize taxes or
maximize profit (“All legal stuff,” one member assured me) and
visit each other’s companies. “Most of the time the forum is
very boring,” Hang said. He rolled out the magazine in 2011,
hoping to promote a more positive image of fuerdai than the
decadent wastrels usually portrayed in the media. It was a
rebranding: Relay’s members dropped the fu (“wealthy”) from
fuerdai and started to refer to themselves using a new term,
chuangerdai, which means “second-generation entrepreneurs,” or
just erdai, “second generation.” Each month the magazine cover
features a different child of privilege, usually male, wearing a
suit and striking a casually authoritative pose—for the July
issue, while leaning on an Audi. (The two-page ad immediately
following the cover is also for Audi.)
“They know only how to show off their wealth but don't know
how to create wealth”
The purpose of the organization, Hang said, is to encourage
second-generation kids to take over the family business or at
least play a role in its management. Such companies are crucial
to the Chinese economy, he said: Not only do they make up 85
percent of non-state-owned enterprises, they also put long-term
success ahead of quarterly results.
The downside is that family-run companies are, well, run by
families, and most kids in China don’t relish the idea of
working alongside their parents. Hang took issue with the
statistic, released by Shanghai Jiaotong University in 2012,
that 82 percent of second-generation heirs aren’t willing to
take over their family business. He didn’t dispute the data so
much as the semantics: “They aren’t willing to do it, but they
still have to.”
It’s a distinction that Hang knows well. His father’s
advertising agency, started in 1993, is one of the largest of
its kind in Jiangxi province. After graduating from college,
Hang avoided the agency. He studied financial management in the
Netherlands and bought the rights to Norron, a Norse god-themed
online game. He was cocky about his business acumen. “I thought
I was awesome,” he said. “I was a fuerdai—I wasn’t interested in
talking to other people.” When the game failed to take off, Hang
decided to join his father’s company. “I had a choice,” he said.
“I could do something else, but it would make my parents work
very hard. They never said I had to, but I thought it was
necessary.”
All fuerdai face a version of the same problem: They have
everything but the ability to surpass their own parents.
Whatever they achieve will be credited to their family, not to
themselves. Hang described always being introduced as “the son
of Mr. Hang.” When Wang, the author, found a publisher for his
book, he didn’t know if they wanted to publish it because it was
good, or because of his famous father. “People will always say
your only competence is that you were reincarnated into a good
family,” he said. He told me about the difficulty of explaining
the burdens of inheritance to the nonwealthy. “They never
understand—‘Why are you in pain?’ ” said Wang. “I say it’s not
relevant. The amount of wealth doesn’t determine how happy you
are. You can only know by experiencing it.”
It’s no surprise that most fuerdai, after summering in Bali
and wintering in the Alps, reading philosophy at Oxford and
getting MBAs from Stanford, are reluctant to take over the
family toothpaste cap factory. Ping Fan, 36, who serves as
executive deputy director of Relay, moved to Shanghai to start
his own investment firm rather than work at his father’s real
estate company in Liaoning province. He picked Shanghai, he
said, “because it was far from my family.” After graduating from
Columbia University, Even Jiang, 28, briefly considered joining
her mother’s diamond import business, but they disagreed about
the direction of the company. Instead, she went to work at
Merrill Lynch, then returned to Shanghai to start a concierge
service, inspired by the American Express service she used when
living in Manhattan. Liu Jiawen, 32, whose parents own a
successful clothing company in Hunan province, tried to start
her own clothing line after graduating. “I wanted to show I
could do it on my own,” she said. The company failed.
Along with riches, fuerdai often inherit a surplus of
emotional trauma. The first generation of Chinese entrepreneurs
came of age during a time that rewarded callousness. “They were
the generation of the Cultural Revolution,” said Wang. “During
that time, there was no humanity.” His grandfather, the
principal of a middle school in Guizhou province, was humiliated
by Red Guards. “They were raised cruelly—there was no mercy. It
was survival of the fittest.” Many fuerdai have their parents’
same coldness, Wang said: “They’re really hard to be friends
with.”
Zhang, the Uber driver, was sent to boarding school
starting in kindergarten, even though his parents lived only a
short distance from the school. Perhaps to compensate for their
inattention, they gave him everything he wanted, including
hundreds of toy cars. Last Christmas he bought himself the
Maserati. “It’s like their childhood has not ended,” Wang said
of his fellow rich kids. “Their childhood was not fully
satisfied, so they always want to prolong the process of being
children.” Thanks to China’s one-child policy, most fuerdai grew
up without siblings. That’s why so many travel in packs on
Saturday nights, Wang said. “They want to be taken care of. They
want to be loved.”
For Zhang, partying is a way of staving off boredom. He
used to go out clubbing five nights a week. “If I didn’t go, I
couldn’t sleep,” he said. He doesn’t lack for companionship, he
added. Two or three times a week, he’ll hire a high-end sex
worker—a “booty call,” in his words—for $1,000 or more. Zhang
prefers paying for sex to flirting with a girl under the
pretense that he might date her. “This way is more direct,” he
said. “I think this is a way of respecting women.” But some
nights, sitting at home alone, he scrolls through the contacts
on his phone only to reach the bottom without finding anyone he
wants to call. When we first spoke, he said he had a girlfriend
of three years who treated him well, but that he didn’t love
her. “You’re the first person I’ve told that to,” he said.
Most fuerdai don’t talk about their problems so openly.
“They have trust issues,” said Wayne Chen, 32, a second-
generation investor from Shanghai. “They need a place to talk.
They need a group.” Relay offers a setting in which they can
speak honestly, without having to pretend. “It’s similar to a
rehab center,” he said.
In July, Jiang noticed that business at a barbecue
restaurant she owns in Shanghai was slower than usual. “It was
only half of the crowd,” she said. The stock market had been
falling since June and was down 38 percent from its peak by the
end of the summer. Over dinner at the restaurant, I asked Jiang
and Chen, who are a couple, as well as Hang, if fuerdai had felt
the pain of the market crash. “Of course,” Jiang said. “A lot of
their family companies are listed.” She herself had bought
stocks, she said, but pulled out when the market got too bumpy.
Chen said his family money was invested in a “risk-averse way,”
much of it in fixed-income assets and funds of funds.
Still, the volatility—and more important, the government’s
clumsy response to it—signaled a deeper discord within China’s
slowing economy, which affects the fuerdai as much as anyone.
Raising money is tougher than before, said Jiang. Hang said the
slowdown has hurt ad sales at the magazine, particularly from
real estate companies.
Many fuerdai have moved money overseas—Boston Consulting
Group put the amount of Chinese money invested abroad at $450
billion in 2013—often with the goal of gaining foreign
citizenship. A survey conducted in 2013 found that 64 percent of
Chinese high-net-worth individuals had emigrated or wanted to
emigrate overseas. I asked Hang, Chen, and Jiang if fuerdai
worry about their money. “Some do,” Hang said. “His dad sent him
to the U.S.” He laughed and pointed at Chen, who is now an
American citizen. Hang, who is married and has a 4-year-old son,
said he hasn’t ruled out emigrating.
It’s not just China’s stock market drop that makes fuerdai
jittery. “It’s society, too,” said Chen. “Like the Occupy Wall
Street protests.” There’s always been a tendency in Chinese
society to “hate the rich,” Hang said. It’s the same sentiment
that fueled the Cultural Revolution, and was once practically
the Communist Party’s mission statement. (Emphasis on “was.”)
Exacerbating the problem, most fuerdai don’t mix much with
the working classes. “When we were children, we went to the best
schools, so we didn’t encounter a lot of poor people,” Hang
said. “This is very dangerous for society.” Relay is therefore
planning to start a program fostering ties between fuerdai and
children from the countryside. It also organizes charity drives.
After a chemical factory exploded in Tianjin in August, killing
more than 100 people, its members donated 1.5 million yuan
through the local government. To hear Hang explain it,
philanthropy is about more than just social responsibility—it’s
about social stability.
That said, when I asked Jiang if she thought inequality was
a problem in China, she was ambivalent. “I don’t know,” she
said. “There are two groups of poor people. One is, you don’t
work hard. You deserve to be poor because you don’t work hard.
Second is, you work hard but can’t succeed. I think we should
help the second group of people. … There’s a saying, jiu ji bu
jiu pin—‘We’ll help you if you have an emergency, but we cannot
help you if you’re poor.’ ”
The search for meaning is arguably harder for fuerdai than
it is for most people
One day this summer, at the urging of a friend, Wang
decided to call his father and tell him he loved him. Wang
senior picked up the phone. “I love you, Dad,” Daqi said. There
was a pause. “Are you drunk?” his father asked. Wang told this
story at a gathering at his father’s complex on a Friday night
in August. The guests were friends he had met through
Lifespring, a self-help company that, with introductory classes
costing upward of $1,000, caters largely to fuerdai. (The
original Lifespring was the subject of numerous lawsuits in the
U.S. in the 1980s and ’90s, including charges of wrongful death,
and went out of business in 1998.) Wang said the group has
helped him reconcile his feelings about his father and has also
provided the support and community he was unable to find at,
say, the club.
With instant gratification never more than a credit card
swipe away, the search for meaning is arguably harder for
fuerdai than it is for most people. Some, like Jiang and Wang,
feel most purposeful when deviating from their parents’ path.
For others, returning to the family business is, to their
surprise, a source of satisfaction. Liu said she’s glad she took
over her family’s clothing company because it made her parents
happy—a sentiment her former rebellious self would probably have
scoffed at.
Not everyone has discovered a purpose. Zhang, the Uber
driver, said his job at the TV production company is hardly his
ideal career. But he’s not sure what is. “As a kid, I had a lot
of dreams,” he said when we met up at the cafe near his office.
“I wanted to be a golfer or a race car driver or a doctor,
something like that. … But when you get older, you see more, and
you see that some goals are just a dream.” He lit up a
cigarette—now illegal indoors in Beijing—barely casting a glance
to see if a waiter would stop him. Zhang never had any
limitations, which was perhaps itself a limitation. “I don’t
really have a plan,” he said. “Probably it’s a sad thing, but
it’s the truth.” When I asked him if he’s happy, he said it’s
all a question of attitude. “You can find a million reasons to
be sad,” he said, “but you only have to find one reason to be
happy. Every day I find one.” I asked him what today’s reason
was. “Today, I meet you,” he said. “It’s a happy thing.”
To contact the author of this story:
Christopher Beam in at jcbeam@gmail.com
To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Nick Summers at nsummers1@bloomberg.net
