About a third of China’s wealth belongs to just one per cent of the population. While China’s poor still inhabit a developing-world economy, a recent report found that the country now has more dollar billionaires than the U.S. does. “What is happening in China constitutes one of the most rapid emergences of wealth stratification in human history,” Jeffrey Winters, a politics professor at Northwestern University, told me. Winters, the author of the book “Oligarchy,” pointed out that China is one of a small number of countries—Russia is the other notable example—where extreme wealth stratification was eliminated in a Communist revolution and then later reëmerged. As in Russia, the sudden formation of a new oligarchy in China means that there are many super-rich people who are unfamiliar with the ways in which more entrenched aristocracies quietly protect their wealth. “No matter the culture or age, old money knows from long experience that it is far safer to be secluded and less seen,” Winters said. But new money, as Thorstein Veblen theorized, asserts itself through conspicuous consumption.
.. A study by the Bank of China and the Hurun Report found that sixty per cent of the country’s rich people were either in the process of moving abroad or considering doing so.
.. But, for affluent Chinese, the most basic reason to move abroad is that fortunes in China are precarious. The concerns go deeper than anxiety about the country’s slowing growth and turbulent stock market; it is very difficult to progress above a certain level in business without cultivating, and sometimes buying, the support of government officials, who are often ousted in anti-corruption sweeps instigated by rivals.
.. “there’s always a fear that, if the officials to whom they’re tied are brought down in an anti-corruption campaign, it could bring trouble for them, too, and lead to the seizure of their assets. There’s also a concern that business rivals who may be better connected to people in the government could use their ties to the party-state to bring down their competitors.”
.. I asked him if the people he works with could be considered China’s one per cent. “I wouldn’t say that they are the one per cent,” Oei replied. “More like between the one and two per cent.” His clients tend to have prospered in regional manufacturing cities, whereas the very wealthiest people are from Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen. “The tippy top of the pyramid have political backing or connections,” he said. “They don’t need to export the wealth.”
.. The home buyer, typically the husband, lives and works in Asia, where cash can be made fast, while establishing his family members in Canada in order to move the money to a place of social and political stability. Yan has coined the term “hedge city” for places like Vancouver: they are a hedge against volatility at home.
.. He has recommended raising the tax on vacant investment properties and called for “far better tracking” of international investment and absentee owners. But it seems unlikely that such measures will be implemented. As prices have risen, ordinary Canadians have found that their homes represent more and more of their net worth. Many people in the federal government, including the Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, have advocated caution when it comes to steps that would depress property values. Besides, rich international buyers mean higher tax revenues. “The state is addicted to the revenue,” Eby told me.
.. Westerners are all about being straightforward and direct. But, when you negotiate a deal in China, it’s all about what’s unsaid, simultaneously hiding and hinting at what you really want.
.. It’s like this: when I am driving here and need to make a turn, I turn on my signal light and do it. It’s the most normal thing in the world. When I first drove in Asia, I flashed my signal and immediately people, instead of slowing down, all sped up to cut me off. It was so maddening, and then, after a little while, I became like everyone else. I never signal when I turn in Asia. I just do it. You don’t have a choice.”
Trudeau’s Canada, Again
Defeating the son of Pierre Trudeau would have been a metaphysical vindication for Harper. For the past decade, Harper did all he could to undo the legacy of the older Trudeau, internationally, domestically and symbolically. In defense of ‘‘old stock’’ white Canada, Harper denigrated the United Nations, made the modest attire of Muslim women a political issue and recast Canada’s role in the world as part of a grand alliance to defend Western civilization.
.. After the boy’s death, Harper’s government continued to inveigh against Muslim ‘‘jihadi’’ immigration in a way that struck me and many others as astoundingly un-Canadian, at least in a historical sense. But the nation’s self-image was precisely what the Conservatives were determined to remake.
.. Depending on whom you ask, he was either the personification of a sophisticated and ambitious Canada or a socialist wastrel libertine. Pierre’s father made a fortune in gas stations, netting $1.2 million in 1932, which freed his son from the need to work — just as Justin never had to make a living. As a young man, Pierre traveled to Africa and Asia, studied at Harvard and the London School of Economics and socialized with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in Paris.
.. During his time as prime minister from 1968 to 1979 and again from 1980 to 1984, the Montreal-born boulevardier was despised in western Canada for an energy policy that enriched the eastern provinces. He was also hated by separatists in Quebec, who saw him as a quisling for Anglo elitists. Yet in many ways he was a visionary. At the time, Canada’s Constitution could be changed only with the approval of Britain’s Parliament, a colonial vestige. In 1982, this provision was done away with, and Trudeau in effect became a Canadian founding father. An intellectual who approached issues with an analytical and a creative mind, he fashioned a constitutional legal landscape midway between America’s rights-based rules and the unwritten and informal British approach.
.. Everyone expected Trudeau to receive a royal beating, including his wife. Brazeau had a black belt in karate and a military background, and he grew up on hardscrabble First Nations reservations; his bar brawler’s physique, tattoos and trash-talking bravado made him the three-to-one favorite by fight night.
.. Slipping through the streets of Ottawa on Nov. 10, six days after his swearing-in, I sat with Trudeau in a motorcade that was comically polite. His peloton of four black S.U.V.s stopped at lights, signaled respectfully, followed the speed limit and used no sirens or police escort. It was like a skit satirizing Canadian manners.
.. I asked the prime minister if the fight with Brass Knuckles Brazeau had been part of a larger plan — a piece of agitprop aimed at turning around his political fortunes, and with them the nation’s. Trudeau gazed out the window for a moment, contemplating, then turned to me and offered a clipped nod and a sly smile. He knew perfectly well the power of symbols and had intended to exploit that power.
How Canada’s Conservatives Can Bounce Back
When the prime minister failed to gain provincial consent to move toward an elected Senate, he asked the Canadian Supreme Court whether he could abolish the Senate outright. Unsurprisingly, the high court told him that abolition would require a constitutional amendment. Frustrated by these rebuffs, Harper simply refused to make any new appointments to the body, accumulating 22 vacancies that will now be filled by his Liberal successor.
.. Pierre Trudeau bequeathed Canada a new constitution that is defective in many important ways, yet also very difficult to amend. It’s one of many blots on Trudeau’s record. It’s also a political fact that politicians must accommodate.
.. Former Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour likes to say that in politics, “the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.” Constitutional reform is not Canada’s main thing.
.. Party activists yearn to “return to principle” because they participate in politics for reasons of self-fulfillment. They integrate issues into larger patterns of political belief, and their political beliefs in turn are crucial to their conception of themselves. Politics endows their lives with meaning and purpose. In other words: Activists are starkly different kinds of people than less active voters, whose consent is crucial to gaining political power. A lifelong political practitioner once advised me, “To ask the typical voter to name his or her most important political issue is like asking them to name their favorite prime number. Their minds just don’t function that way.”
What Justin Trudeau’s Victory Means for Canada
Laurier first employed the phrase in 1895, in response to the Manitoba Schools Question, a political crisis sparked when the premier of Manitoba withdrew public funding from Catholic schools, which were of great importance to the province’s French-speaking minority, and, by extension, to the province of Quebec. The next year, Laurier, the French-Catholic leader of the Liberal Party, won an election fought on the issue, ending the rule of the Conservative Party, which had led Canada almost continuously since its founding, in 1867
.. His approach, he said, would be to conduct an investigation, seek out the facts, and then use conciliation. He called it “sunny ways,” evoking the Aesop fable in which the sun and the wind compete to see which can force a man to take off his coat. The wind makes the man to cling more tightly to his garment, while the sun’s warmth induces him to take it off.
.. Harper’s critics have often seemed to suggest that his envisioned Canada was small-souled and excessively concerned with money. He did little to dispel that impression in his concession speech. Addressing his remarks to all Canadians, he said that he and his wife had gone into public life “because we believed that hard-working Canadians should keep more of the money they earn … because we believed that government should manage the people’s money the way people should manage their own.”