Summer in the City of To-morrow

While searching for places to watch the Olympics, I stumbled upon a shopping mall in the northeast corner of the city called 蓝色港湾, also known in English as Solana. Aside from the Chinese staff, there's nothing whatsoever about Solana to indicate that it's not actually some upscale Westfield development you'd find in over-built LA county exurbs like Irvine or Santa Clarita. The complex was built in a pseudo-opulent Vegas style, with covered walkways and patterned outdoor floor tile and projectile fountain shows, and you get end-to-end generic brand shopping, all Nike and Starbucks and Coldstone Creamery for a solid quarter mile. If there was ever a sign of the homogenized lifestyles of the globalized middle class, this has got to be it.

Despite its impressive structural flair, Solana has all the marking of an urban speculation bust. It seems to have been rushed into fruition with the Olympic timetable in mind. The grounds are decorated with wheelbarrows, dust, and piles of construction debris. Half of the units are empty; the other half are fully-staffed and air-conditioned shops whose Saturday morning patronage was composed of exactly Dan and myself.

We didn't end up buying anything, though. The sports bar we were looking for, All-Star, had received a near-ejaculatory thumbs-up from City Weekend, one of those expat periodicals that seem to consist primarily of creatively untruthful ad copy in the guise of in-the-know reviews and top-10 lists. All-Star was claimed to operate 24 hours a day and supposedly has dozens of flat-screen displays with satellite feeds, but when we actually got there, the front door was shut, and it looked like the place was still under construction.

A couple miles away, business at the Beijing Ikea is considerably more healthy. Like McDonald's, Ikea is mostly the same product in Beijing as it is in Burbank or Emeryville. You can load up on Malm queen-sized bedframes and lingonberry juice from the Swedish grocery behind the registers. By all indications, the in-store food service is a huge hit. Something about the Ikea cafeteria, with its sterilized menu and generic Euro-y sans-serif aesthetics, seems to resonate powerfully with the consumer instincts of China's nouveau riche, so much so that I sometimes think that Ikea might represent a modern experience that's totally above culture and local variation. The modern high-rise dweller loves Ikea, no matter where you are.

In ths US, the central appeal of Ikea's wares is their position at a low-cost/nifty-design sweet spot, one I would describe as Tasteful but Basically Crappy. No such thing is possible in China, given the enormous range of less expensive home furnishings widely available elsewhere. Indeed, the Chinese Ikea offers a weird kind of high-end living, one that seems definitionally mediocre to the jaded American eye but is actually sort of elite in a society where bourgeois mediocrity is only available to a tiny minority of newly-endowed consumers. In the first place, when you take into account cheaper alternatives and relative income levels, Ikea's stuff just isn't all that affordable when it's marketed in China. Here, the relatively high cost isn't justified by a corresponding difference in material quality, but rather by intangibles like decent customer service—reliable money-back guarantees are apparently novel enough to warrant huge instructional billboards outside of the entryway—or even by notions of fetish value, in the vein of brand identity or conspicuous consumption. I sort of imagine that when Chinese yuppies compare the Ikea coffee tables that decorate their flats, they'd converse with something like genuine interest, rather than the ironic quasi-resignation of their coy US counterparts.