A bit more on the Dongsishitiao Subway Station Area

Like the area around the Dongzhimen subway station—see my earlier October 23rd, “That was then, this was now” post—all kinds of new construction had been going on around the Dongsishitiao subway station. For example, the lighter colored building off to the side in the photo above, which is a luxury apartment community, was still under construction during the spring of 2007.

Two other luxury apartment complexes, “Sun City” and the “Seasons,” are located a little ways further down the Dongsishitiao Dajie and a bit off to the other side of the street. For three months or I visited the “Seasons” every Sunday to I tutor seven year old Chinese girl in oral English and earned around an extra 2,500 RMB in cash.

While a majority of the residents are rich laowai holding high level positions in foreign companies and joint venture enterprises or in Non-Governmental Organizations, a not insubstantial number of wealthy Chinese families own apartments here. The husband in this particular family was a Bank of China Vice President while the wife worked for Oracle Software. She drove an Audi, and the family also had a driver, who took us down to the Wangfujing Pedestrian Mall's Foreign Languages Bookstore when I wanted to pick out study materials for their daughter.

The apartment itself would not have been out of place in Manhatten's Upper East Side or in some posh London neighborhood. The sitting room was very big, the furniture in it was French provincial style, and there was a big plasma TV set. The entry hall boasted a shrub in a small, shallow pool with running water. There was a large dining room and a western style kitchen and bathrooms. Finally, there were clearly more than two bedrooms in this apartment—the one bedroom that I could seem from the entry hall area was being used as a home office.

Decades ago Deng Xiao Ping proclaimed that to get rich is glorious. China now has lots of wealthy people. And like wealthy people in the West, these people are indeed different from the other 99% of the Chinese because the lives they lead are, well, quite different from those led by the Middle Kingdom’s ordinary and less well-off citizens.