China's love affair with England "It's been really successful in the Chinese market," Huang Rykiel told me. It occurred to me that few Chinese would actually know who any of these people were. Would Dunhill use distinguished Chinese gentlemen for the campaign? With some things you just have to insist, this is our strategy and we're not going to change it. Chinese ambassadors would give instant recognition, but it would dilute the brand identity. In other words, what's successful about it is that it's British. Paul Robinson, the chairman of Shanghai's most opulent members' club, M1NT (ZHANG KECHUN/MOSTARTISTS.COM) "In China," Paul Robinson, the English chairman of M1NT, Shanghai's most opulent members' club, told me, "they wake up expecting today to be better than yesterday, and tomorrow to be better than today. In the West, we think tomorrow will be worse. It was nearing midnight. Robinson had given me a guided tour of the club; the plush bar-cum-dance area, with its discrete, roped-off private booths, and booming house music, played by a team of Western DJs; the rooftop terrace with its commanding views over Shanghai's neon-drenched skyline; the enormous tank where baby sharks sidled lazily back and forth, seemingly sizing up the prosperous and stylishly clad clientele on the other side with a predatory eye. Now we were eating dinner - Peking duck and foi gras terrine, prime Angus steak flown in from Australia - in the club's smart restaurant, the skyline like a shimmering curtain hanging at the window. Robinson, who worked as the finance director at Virgin Records in London, and then ran EMI in Australia and Asia, opened M1NT in Shanghai in 2008. An estimated 210,000 foreigners live and work in Shanghai (double the number of those in Beijing), but 85 per cent of M1NT's members, who pay 6,500 yuan a year for membership, were the newly wealthy, "aspirational" Chinese, Robinson said - people who had made their money in real estate, retail and manufacturing. "People are here because they've got the money to spend," Robinson told me. And they don't just want to spend it - they want to be seen spending it. The biggest selling beverage in M1NT is Dom Pérignon, a significant marker in M1NT's new business plan: an online wine-retailing service, M1NTcellars. China, Robinson says, is developing an insatiable thirst for quality liquor and wines. The country's imported retail liquor industry had a turnover of $4.1 billion in 2011, and is growing by 80 per cent a year, but there is no online retailer of imported wines nor chain of liquor retailers in mainland China. As the Apple store is to technology, Robinson said, so M1NTcellars will be to wine. In three years people will be drinking Moët et Chandon at every wedding, every birthday celebration. He gazed out at the skykline, twinkling like the lights on a Las Vegas slot machine. Just imagine what the market will be like when you have one billion people doing that. Winston Churchill," said Mr Tang, pointing to the statue standing outside a pavement cafe. A rough facsimile, but close enough. Closer, certainly, than the statue farther down the street of a lithe young woman, which only the aerated soufflé of a haircut intimated might be Diana, Princess of Wales. "And see this..." Mr Tang pointed to the traditional red telephone box bearing the incongruous legend china telecom. "Very English!" he said with a delighted laugh. I was visiting Mr Tang, who worked in research and development at a large pharmaceutical company in Shanghai, at his weekend retreat in Thames Town. A facsimile of an English country town - all half-timbered mock-Tudor buildings, cobbled lanes and Georgian terraces - which lies at the end of the Shanghai Metro Line 9, 25 miles from the city, Thames Town is a part of Songjiang New City - a sprawling modern conurbation that includes seven university campuses and what is claimed to be the largest shopping mall in the world. Opened in 2006 and built at a cost of £200 million, Thames Town is one rather peculiar element in the "one city, nine towns plan," a scheme devised by the former mayor of Shanghai, Chen Liangyu, to stimulate residential development in the suburbs while at the same time giving free rein to local and foreign architects to create designs inspired by European themes. (Mr Chen is currently serving 18 years" imprisonment. "Political problem," Mr Tang said lightly.) Thames Town was built by a British engineering and design company, Atkins, which worked on much of the infrastructure for the London Olympics. Other schemes include Breeza Citta di Pujiang, based on a Venetian theme, and Anting New Town, a German-themed development designed by Albert Speer Jr, the son of Hitler's favourite architect. Mr Tang in Thames Town, which includes replica telephone boxes and a church closely modelled on Christ Church, Clifton Down in Bristol (ZHANG KECHUN/MOSTARTISTS.COM) Thames Town was originally planned as a community of 10,000 people, providing housing for staff at the numerous universities of Songjiang New City and for Shanghai commuters, but properties were quickly snapped up by wealthy buyers as second homes or investments. Only a third of Thames Town's residents live there permanently, Mr Tang told me. Professionals. A few government officials..." The rest, like Mr Tang himself, live in Shanghai or elsewhere, visiting only at weekends. A jovial man of 50, dressed in jeans and a combat shirt, Mr Tang told me that he had visited England on a business trip in 2001 and fallen in love with it. When the opportunity came up to buy an apartment in one of the low-rise blocks that encircle Thames Town's centre, he jumped at it. "I like to get away from the concrete jungle," he said. Lots of people come here at the weekend to savour the atmosphere, so they don't have to pay for a trip to London. For me it's a place to relax, drink tea and have family reunions. Drinking tea appeared to be one of Mr Tang's hobbies. The living-room in his apartment was dominated by an impressive, elaborately carved wooden tea-set, and as we talked he busied himself with the ritual of boiling water, pouring it into cups, emptying the cups over an exquisite clay teapot, spooning tea into the pot, filling the pot with water, filling the cups with tea... It was a demonstration of Mr Tang's refinement and good taste, along with the ornately carved mahogany furniture in his living-room, the beautiful oil paintings on the wall. "China now is in the first stage of consumerism," he said. "We were poor for a long time, then we suddenly opened our eyes and realised, "Oh, there's so much good stuff in this world, I want to possess everything!" Everybody's buying crazily, but it's mostly for face, to impress others. Later, people will have to calm down. And also it depends on whether we really need all this stuff. For example, older Chinese, we like furniture. He gestured around the room. Young people on the other hand don't care about furniture. They don't give a shit about furniture! What about bags, I asked. "We don't care so much about bags," Mr Tang said. He reached for his own leather man-bag. This is cheaper than Louis Vuitton, very good quality, and I can get it repaired anywhere in the world. Why would I want to have a Louis Vuitton bag? So he didn't care about impressing people? Mr Tang laughed. Mr Tang suggested we take a stroll around town. It felt, curiously, like walking around Henley or Maidenhead - but a Henley or Maidenhead eerily devoid of people. There was a pub, neatly trimmed lawns and hedges, a terrace of handsome Regency houses. We passed a sign saying, welcome to thames town. taste authentic british style of small town. enjoy sunlight, enjoy nature, enjoy your life & holiday. dreaming of britain, live in thames town. We strolled down a neo-Georgian street lined with shops, passing another sign, this one saying toilet, with a Chinese translation below; almost none of the shops was occupied. Mr Tang beamed contentedly. He liked to take a walk in the evenings, he said, when he had the town almost to himself, and think about life. We passed a newly married couple posing for pictures in front of a row of mock-Tudor houses. Then another newly married couple. And another. It began to dawn on me - virtually the only people here were newlyweds, and the few shops that were occupied weren't shops at all, but photographic studios where hairdressers and make-up artists were primping and preening the brides in readiness for their pictures. Couples are photographed in front of the English-style church in Thames Town, one of nine European-style "towns" outside Shanghai (ZHANG KECHUN/MOSTARTISTS.COM) We emerged on to the market square - an expanse of lush green lawn in front of an imposing Gothic church (it is modelled on Christ Church, Clifton Down in Bristol). A dozen or so couples, with their retinue of photographers and stylists, were pacing back and forth in search of the perfect shot. The church, surprisingly, was actually a place of worship - Catholic, with a congregation of some 200, a woman in the adjacent Christian bookshop - a curious establishment stocking kitsch ornaments, American self-help titles such as So Long, Insecurity and posters of the Pope - told me. She gestured to the posing newlyweds. But I don't think any were actually married here. Now Mr Tang led the way out of the town centre to an imposing modern building - the Songjiang Urban Planning Exhibition Hall. Beautifully constructed scale models of Songjiang New City spread across a broad expanse of exhibition space. Songjiang, he said, was the first human settlement in the region of what is now Shanghai, almost 2,000 years ago. You have to see this. He led the way to a screening room, where an attendant handed out 3D glasses. The film was a Pixar-style animated history of Songjiang, beginning with the dawn of creation: planet earth forming from the globular mass, oceans churning, forests sprouting, hunter-gatherers giving way to farmers, a village becoming a town, the growth of art, culture, commerce. It accelerated into the modern age, through the 1930s and the ravages of war with Japan (neatly skirting the period of Mao and the ravages of the Cultural Revolution) to arrive, with a crescendo of stirring music, at the present day with sweeping panoramic views of Songjiang New City - the culmination, it seemed, of four and a half billion years of evolution. "Proud," the commentary intoned, "to be in the vanguard of the world, progressing our glorious history." The screen went blank. Giddy and blinking, we filed back out into the exhibition hall. I paused again at the model. "It's exactly how they said it would be," Mr Tang said. At the edge of the model was a swath of green baize - awaiting its own perfect model, the Songjiang Central Business District - three square kilometres of tower blocks and offices. Coming soon. There was something distinctly familiar about this display. The day before visiting Songjiang I had been in a similar exhibition hall in the town of Suzhou - similar but much larger. Suzhou is known as the Venice of China, the old city a popular tourist destination, with its network of canals, pagodas, classical gardens and narrow streets lined with restaurants and souvenir shops. It is also one of China's most prosperous cities, having expanded at an extraordinary rate in recent years through a series of satellite developments. Foremost among these is the Suzhou Industrial Park (SIP), a joint development between the Chinese and Singaporean governments. In 18 years 288 square kilometres of agricultural land have been transformed into the industrial and residential centre of a new city, and it is still growing. Strolling around the enormous model of the scheme in the SIP Exhibition Hall was like looking at a miniaturised version of a new planet. I paused at a series of photographs taken in the area in the 1960s; one showed a group of Mao-jacketed farmers gathered around a wooden stage watching some kind of improving performance or Party speech; another showed a ramshackle bridge across a lake. I would see it later that evening - now transformed into a row of gleaming restaurants. Sam Michael, a young American who lives in Suzhou and works for the European company Value Retail, was showing me around. Value Retail owns Bicester Village, the discount shopping outlet in Oxfordshire, which I had visited earlier in my travels, and which is so popular with Chinese visitors to Britain that an estimated two out of three make the pilgrimage there in search of discount Gucci, Prada and Mulberry. Now Value Retail is opening a "Chinese Bicester" in Suzhou. Throughout my travels in China I had been struck time and again by how luxury is one of the holy grails of the new middle class. Luxury and a bargain. As Bicester Village is to London, Michael explained, so Suzhou Village would be to Shanghai - far enough away from the centre to avoid luxury brands, as it were, competing with themselves on price, but close enough to make it a diverting day-out for bargain hunters. It was shopping as "destination tourism." Construction is under way on "Chinese Bicester," a designer outlet village modelled on the one in Oxfordshire and owned by the same company (ZHANG KECHUN/MOSTARTISTS.COM) 'China's story going forward is the growing middle class, not the growing über-rich," Michael said. There's going to be this huge class of consumer that wants to buy a nice thing or two, but doesn't have the cash to fly to Europe and doesn't have the cash to buy in tons. So while we want the very wealthy to shop here, we also see there will be a lot of value in having the aspirational shoppers - the women for whom it's their first luxury bag. Discount outlets already exist in China, of course, but they tend to follow a similar model, Michael said: a cluster of buildings on the outskirts of a big city, selling stock that is sometimes four to five seasons old. That's a complaint I hear a lot from Chinese people about some of the existing outlets. We won't allow that to happen in any of our outlets, because it impacts on the overall impression. We require that the merchandise offered be in season and from the previous year's collection. We took the highway from the exhibition hall, through the SIP "education area," where Harvard and the University of Liverpool both have faculties, and past what felt like mile and after mile of low-slung industrial facilities (Black & Decker, Amazon, Siemens, Samsung), driving towards the area earmarked for the next stage of development - tourism. The buildings gave way to fields. At the Suzhou Village site stood a huge billboard, bearing an artist's impression of the new development, in what - it had now become apparent - was the standard contemporary Chinese style, which is to say a kind of ersatz parody European, in this case Italianate. Suzhou Village will house more than a hundred outlets, but for now it was merely a promise - an empty field awaiting the daintily shod footsteps of 100,000 Chinese consumers, swapping their Mao-faced yuan for Western goods. I looked back towards towering skyscrapers of the new Suzhou. In the other direction, across the expanse of agricultural land, one could see the faint outlines of an ancient pagoda and temple. The land, Michael said, would soon be ploughed up to make way for a theme park. I had come to Suzhou to look at another aspect of China's future, and its relation to the rest of the world - education. In all the conversations that I had in China about the aspirations of the new middle class, one thing appeared to be held in higher regard than almost anything else: a Western education. "Everybody knows the universities in Britain and America are the best," Mr Gau had told me as we sat in a cafe in Shanghai. He was a shipping agent with whom I had fallen into conversation during his lunch break. Why do you think so many government officials send their children there? In recent years there has been a large rise in the number of programmes within China to prepare students for a Western university education. Foremost among the English schools involved in such programmes is Dulwich College, a south London independent school. Dulwich College has had a long association with China. It was one of the first independent schools in Britain to introduce Mandarin into its curriculum, in 2004, and has long been a favourite among Chinese parents wanting to educate their children in Britain. There are currently 70 students from mainland China and Hong Kong at the school. It opened its first international school, in Shanghai, in 2003, and now has branches in Beijing and Suzhou, as well as Seoul. These cater mostly for expatriate families. In 2010 the college introduced a GCSE and A-level programme following the English curriculum, in a private high school, Yung Wing, in Zhuhai - the gateway city between China and Macau - with the specific goal of preparing Chinese students for a Western university education. This year Dulwich opened a similar programme in Suzhou High School - one of the top-ranked state high schools in China. Dulwich College already offers scholarships to two students from Suzhou to study for A-levels in Britain. There are 329 students, boys and girls, enrolled in the Dulwich programme at Suzhou - the offspring, in the main, of successful business people or government officials, who pay fees of £10,000 a year for their children to receive a quintessential English education without having to leave China. The faculty is largely British and American, with some Chinese teaching assistants. Students wear Dulwich College uniforms, unlike the rest of the student body at Suzhou High, who wear whatever they like. Signs in the smart new faculty building state that only English is to be spoken. A group of students from Dulwich College, Suzhou, surf the internet in the grounds outside the school (ZHANG KECHUN/MOSTARTISTS.COM) 'Suzhou is a very developed international city because it's near to Shanghai, and the income here is relatively high," Zhang Xin, the principal of Suzhou High School, told me. I was sitting in a second-floor office in the new faculty building with Mr Zhang, a stolid, unsmiling man in a suit and tie; and Dr Peter Le Masurier and Sharon Zhuang, who co-lead the Dulwich College programme as the English director and the principal respectively. "People here interact more with foreigners, and they want their children to go abroad because of the opportunities it presents for the future," Mr Zhang went on. Students want the same thing, so they would rather study in the European system than the Chinese one. The Chinese education system is intensely competitive and focused almost entirely on academic achievement, culminating in the final, and decisive, ordeal of the Gaokao, the annual national university entrance exam. This determines whether a candidate will take a much coveted place in a grade-one university, considerably enhancing their prospects for a job in commerce, industry or government. Recently Weibo was alive with photographs of high-school students in the Hubei Xiaogan No 1 Middle School collectively receiving intravenous drips of amino acids, for energy, while studying for the exams. The school explained that in order to save students the time it would take to travel to a clinic for amino acid injections, it had been arranged for them to receive them in the classroom. But the pressure starts much earlier than that. A 2010 study of nine- to 12-year-olds in Hangzhou, the provincial capital of Zhejiang, led by Therese Hesketh, a professor at University College London, found that one in three children questioned exhibited the "physical symptoms" typical of stress, including headaches and stomach pains. More than 80 per cent worried "a lot" about exams, two thirds feared punishment by their teachers and almost three quarters reported fearing physical punishment by their parents. "We can say "pressure," or on the other hand we might say "expectation,"" Sharon Zhuang told me. I think this has something to do with the one-child policy. Since there's only one child in the family, if he's not successful, the whole family will be called a failure. She had seen the consequences of this among the students at Suzhou High, she said. Upset, depressed... I can't say exactly how many, but every year we see a certain number of students like that. A few even leave school, or leave home; some - very few - even try to cut themselves. It's serious. But Chinese parents still try to avoid these psychological problems. They really don't want to face it. In the West, they face it and try to find a solution, but in China there's a tendency for teachers to notice it and parents to not want to discuss it. Every school now has a doctor or psychologist. Even junior schools. At our school we have several. We are very focused on this kind of work, working with students and parents and tutors. "There are huge pressures to get into top universities because it obviously helps you with your career and financially," Dr Le Masurier said. The Chinese education system is geared towards putting students through the Gaokao, and for a country the size of China, it has a lot of benefits. Everyone has the opportunity to take the Gaokao to get into a top school. But the downside is that a lot of the education is perhaps geared towards that one test. What we're trying to do is add more creativity on top. Unlike the standard Chinese curriculum, which focuses solely on academic subjects, the Dulwich programme also emphasises the creative arts, drama, music and an environmental programme, with a view to offering the kind of well-rounded education that would stand pupils in better stead for applying to Western universities. According to Le Masurier, some 70 per cent of the Dulwich students will be applying to American universities, the remainder to British - some to both - and to other universities around the world. "American universities in particular are looking for more than just exam results," he said. They're looking for leadership, teamwork, creativity. Presumably, I said, pupils at Dulwich College in London are taught a view of world history and politics that might not necessarily accord with the Chinese view. Is this true of the curriculum at Suzhou? We have to be sensitive to the country we're in - and we are. At the moment we don't offer a politics course, so it's not an issue, and we also don't offer history, so it's also not an issue. "There's a cachet among Chinese families for a British independent education," he went on. They like the idea of the prestige and the class, but beyond that the depth of knowledge of what that actually means can be very different. You've got parents very focused on wanting their children to go to a foreign university because they see that as a big advantage for their career; parents who are interested in our educational philosophy, and parents who see it as a trend and understand very little of what the school is delivering. Part of what we have to do is make sure the parents understand what they're coming into, and make sure they understand that a Dulwich education means certain things and a certain attitude to life that is very different from an elitist point of view. Managing parents" expectations, then, was an important part of the job. We do have an expectation that we should be getting our students into a certain number of top schools. Not everybody is able, and also not everybody is a good fit, for Cambridge. There are times when we also we need to have a good discussion with both the students and the parents and say, "Your son is not an A student, he's a B student, and there's nothing wrong with that." He can get into a good school as a B student, that he will feel comfortable in and will achieve in and have a very successful life from. Those discussions are very important. Le Masurier suggested I speak to some of his students - half a dozen 15-year-olds, boys and girls, some of the most self-possessed 15-year-olds I had ever met. All spoke near-flawless English. Where, I asked, did they expect an English education would take them? "Stanford," said one. "Berkeley," said another. "Cambridge," said a third. All insisted that their choice was "100 per cent" their idea and not their parents." There wasn't a B student among them. So this, I thought, as I walked along Shanghai's Bund a couple of days later, is what we have given the world. Leather wallets and belts. Red telephone boxes. Winston Churchill and the Princess of Wales. The best education money can buy. The Bund was once the heart of the old British (and later international) Settlement, the riverfront lined with majestic buildings - banks, trading houses and colonial offices - the relics of an Empire on which, it was believed, the sun would never set. On the opposite side of the river now stands a dense, towering forest of testosterone skyscrapers - one of the breathtaking sights of the modern world. It was Sunday, the first day of the Moon holiday, and the esplanade was thronged with holidaymakers and sightseers, many carrying small paper Chinese flags that they waved happily as they posed for photographs. As I sat on a wall two girls approached and asked me to take their photograph as they posed against the skyscrapers. "These buildings are very new," they said proudly, and, pointing to those lining the Bund, "those are very old." They giggled, happy to have someone to practise their English on. "In the 19th century," said one, "I think England was number one. And in the 20th century, America number one. And now..." She giggled again. I knew what was coming. And it did.