Some readers of this blog seemed mystified as to why Chinese would want to send Taikonauts into space 40 years after Russia and the US did so, and without the threat of a technology race or a Cold War. This article in the Telegraph seems to show that same tendency mirrored in China's nouveau riche elite. Just look at the self-satisfied smirk of Mr. Zhang Yuchun (via the Telegraph link), who appears to be suffering from some sort of alcohol excess. The French palace Mr. Zhang Yuchun has built for himself in the dusty suburbs of Beijing is modelled on 1642 Chateau Maisons-Lafitte, but he thought the wings were too small and he added two bigger wings based on Fontainebleu, one of the Ancien Regime's summer palaces.

I remember thinking when I visited Versailles and Fontainbleu over a decade ago, that I understood why the French Revolution and the beheadings took place. But now, what is happening in China is completely different. Ever watch one of those movies that happens in reverse, where the baby gets sucked back into the womb, or the messy red paste on the streets miraculously reforms itself into a sack of tomatoes and deposits istelf neatly on a skyscraper window ledge? That seems to be what is happening, in some gross perversion of the Hegelian dialectic - we are going from dictatorship of the proletariat to crass capitalistic binges of the most embarrassing kind.

I can't help but hear Hong Kong's favorite ABBA song in the background: "Money, money, money - it's a rich man's world."