Free When a Billion Chinese Jump by Jonathan Watts Page A

meat, most of it beef. 13 Fattening a cow by a kilogram requires four times as much grain and far more water than fattening a chicken by the same amount. To feed its growing livestock, China now imports huge quantities of soy, much of it from Brazil, which has resulted in accelerated clearance of Amazonian forest and Cerrado savanna for cultivation and a shifting of the irrigation pressure to Brazil and other suppliers of grain. In policymaking circles, this is known as importing “virtual water.” In practice it often means exporting environmental stress.
    Shanghai’s bright cosmetic exterior has been achieved at the expense of the places that provide its resources and deal with its waste. Like many other wealthy cities around the world, the high-protein, high-octane, jetsetting lifestyle is being paid for elsewhere. As the “head of the dragon” grows hungrier and heavier, its ecological footprint is sinking deeper and wider.
    At two o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon I stood in front of the imposing colonial facade of Number 18 on the Bund, where I planned to climb a step higher up the consumer ladder. During the colonial era, this had been the center of foreign power. British, French, and Japanese financial institutionsbuilt their regional headquarters here in grand styles befitting their claim to empire. By turns art deco, Gothic, baroque, and Romanesque, this promenade on the Huangpu River was home to the magnificent Cathay Hotel, the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, several shipping firms, the British consulate, the Jardine Matheson trading house, a number of telegraph companies, a customs house with a replica of Big Ben, and the Shanghai Club, where financiers, military officers, and administrators determined the fate of the natives over gin and tonics at the 30-meter “Long Bar,” at the time the biggest in the world.
    After the 1949 revolution, the imperialists were kicked out and the communists requisitioned the art deco buildings for party organs and government offices. The pendulum swung again in the 1990s, when the Shanghai Club became a showcase for the nation’s reform and opening-up policy. Now the Bund was once again a bridgehead for empires, this time in the form of domestic brokerages and shipping firms and foreign retailers and restaurant franchises.
    Number 18 was the former China headquarters of Standard Chartered Bank. It had recently been transformed with Taiwanese money into one of Shanghai’s premier adult playhouses. Wandering in through the giant faux Greek columns, I was instantly submerged in marketing and wealth. At one end of the mezzanine level, a dazzling gold panel provided the backdrop for three grinning statues in the
Standard Times
series by the contemporary artist Gao Xiaowu, at the other a guitarist and cello player strummed live Muzak behind a balustrade. I felt out of place with a scruffy beard and no socks. But nobody seemed concerned about dress code. There were even fewer customers than at the Barbie emporium. I was as much of an audience as the Muzakians were likely to get at this time on a weekday.
    On the ground floor, the former bank offices had become boutiques for Cartier, Zegna, Boucheron, Patek Philippe, and A. Lange & Söhne. Up above, the sixth-floor roof terrace had been lavishly fitted out as the nightclub Bar Rouge. In between were a French-run restaurant, a contemporary art gallery, and the China headquarters of international designer brands. This, I felt, was where a real-life Barbie would come shopping and clubbing.
    My guide was Emily Zhang Huijia, who had been recommended by a mutual friend as a connoisseur of consumption. She was a friendly, intelligent young woman from a middle-class family. Her mother was a hospitalaccountant. Her father was a lighting engineer for the Shanghai Opera. Emily was the public relations manager for Number 18 on the Bund.
    Over a 48-yuan Tsingtao beer (normal retail price 3 yuan), she told me she had been a fashionista since her