China: imitating everything from eggs to European towns
Staff Reporter 2012-11-11 11:07
The Hallstatt in Huizhou city, Hubei province. (Photo courtesy of Huizhou.cn)
Hallstatt in Austria. (Internet photo)
Chinese property developers are resorting to extreme measures — replicating famous European towns — in an attempt to boost the faltering domestic property market, which has plunged since last summer. Wuhan city in Hubei province signed a contracted with developer Greenland Group on Wednesday to spend 40 billion yuan (US$6.4 billion) to build an European-style small town in the area over the next three to five years.
The project was not the first one in China that boasted a perfect imitation of well-known European towns. Developers in Shanghai, Tianjin and Guangdong have built "genuine" European towns with the local government, which they were hoping to attract expatriates and people who have lived abroad and revive their sales, according to Want Daily, our Chinese-language sister newspaper.
The most classic example was Hallstatt in Huizhou, Guangdong province, which recreated Hallstatt in Austria, a small lake-side Alpine village and an UNESCO world heritage site. The Chinese-version of Hallstatt, which is a result of cooperation between Chinese mining company China Minmetals Corporation and the local government, reportedly sent "spies" to the Alpine village to get its precise measurements and blueprint before returning to China to produce a full-scale replication, according to British tabloid Daily Mail.
Many Chinese scholars criticized these quasi-European properties as soulless imitations and their residents as "living in Disney World." However, Austria's Hallstatt remained positive on the imitation, its mayor signing a friendship agreement with the Huizhou government in June, hoping to attract Chinese tourists to Austria to see the original Alpine town, according to Want Daily.
The Anting New Town in Shanghai was also built to recreate the atmosphere of European town in Germany. The Shanghai government was planning to build several European-style towns to attract foreign residents or expatriates and tested the market by building the Anting town. Although the town was designed by a German architect and has a European-style square and church, the quality of its construction was poor. It also lacked of sufficient educational and traffic infrastructure. Few houses in the town were filled so that Shanghai government dropped its plan to build other European replicas such as Little Italy or Little Spain, reported the Taiwanese media.
