Over the years, China’s rich kids have become synonymous with obscene displays of wealth: Posing next to Bentleys and Lamborghinis, showing off stacks of yuan on social media and giving pets gold Apple watches, to name a few.
These days, however, that’s become more of an exception than the rule. Yes, they still hoard luxury goods and order $500 bottles of champagne, and occasionally somebody sparks outrage by driving a Mercedes into the Forbidden City. But on the whole they’re starting to understand it’s better to keep their heads down, particularly after President Xi Jinping’s government started targeting billionaires in the past few years.
“We learned how to behave when we saw our friends’ families taken down and jailed,” said Tu Haoran, 32, founder of Fantasy Entertainment, one of China’s largest DJ agencies. “There have been too many cases around me since 2016. Everyone is playing the low-profile card now. You don’t have to let the world know that you make some money. What’s the point of being high-profile?”
Things are set to become more precarious for the extremely wealthy in China, from Jack Ma on down. While the economy could become the world’s biggest within the decade, it’s also one of the most unequal — a problem only made worse by the pandemic. And Xi is stepping up efforts to ensure wealth is more evenly distributed among the nation’s 1.4 billion people ahead of 2022, when a once-every-five-year change in leadership could see him hold on to the presidency for a third term.
At a major Communist Party meeting in October to discuss future economic plans, Xi told officials that China’s development was “unbalanced and insufficient.” He added that “common prosperity” should be the ultimate goal as he looks ahead to the 100-year anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 2049.
Xi’s statement appeared to mark a shift from former leader Deng Xiaoping, who said it’s fine for some people to “get rich first” when he initiated market-friendly reforms in the 1980s that turned China into a manufacturing powerhouse. Yet Deng also made clear that China, as a socialist country, couldn’t have permanently rich and poor classes, said Enodo Economics chief economist Diana Choyleva.
