The Trends of Chinese and American Elites

Individual and collective hobbies reflect the style of our society to a certain extent. An innovative society stresses overcoming struggles, pushing oneself beyond the limit and focusing not on what you already have, but on your future potential.

Among my circle of friends, there are a lot of successful people. This, of course, has to do with my background of higher education. Recently, I have gradually discovered that although most of my Chinese friends have a Ph.D. like I do, the ones living in China have increasingly different habits and hobbies from the ones living in the United States.

One friend, who is a professor at Beijing University, can be described as being at the top of his field. When we recently spoke on the telephone, he complained of being old (in fact, he is two years younger than me) and said his health is getting worse. He attributed all of it to the typical lifestyle habits of a successful Chinese person: a lot of entertaining and big events to attend, eating meal after meal and drinking one cup after another, never walking and always sitting in a car… This is generally the case for all of the same type of friends I have in China.

Another friend in the United States recently finished a long cycling competition in the summer that was more than 200 kilometers, keeping up for more than 10 hours. After listening to this I was very surprised. In the past, I had never heard of athletics being a hobby of hers; when did she become so “extreme”?

I suppose, when in Rome, do as the Romans do. She works in a large tech company where her colleagues are constantly comparing their long distance running and long distance cycling achievements with each other. Her husband is also in the high-tech industry and recently got really into cycling. He invited me to go for a 40 kilometer bike ride. I have always considered myself to be a good long distance runner, and was confident I would not lose to him; however, I ended up in bitter defeat. Not willing to give in, I have started to train with an indoor bicycle, and have the intention of breaking the ironman triathlon record of three hours.

One day after finishing an intensive workout at the gym, a friendly middle-aged stranger said hello and asked about my distance, time, speed and progress. After chatting with him, I found out that he once broke the world record of cycling 350 miles (over 560 kilometers), but was forced to stop training because of a bad knee and was now preparing to stage a comeback…

This is the story of my life. I live and work in the Boston area; along with Stockholm, Helsinki, Amsterdam and San Francisco, it is listed in The Economist as one of the world’s “elite cities.” This “elite” is based on high-tech concentration and cultural trailblazers. There is a strong correlation between the two. The so-called “cultural trailblazers” include the successful people competing in the new economy who particularly like to engage in extreme sports. For example, not long ago, the New York Times published a long article about a father who learned how to swim from the beginning so that he could participate in the ironman triathlon with his children. This is indeed a great challenge for someone who is over 50 years of age. He described how he thought of Chopin’s music when he struggled in the water and how he made an analogy between his piano training and swimming.

The Wall Street Journal published an article about the experience of a long distance butterfly stroke competition. Recently, another article was published about a 41-year-old woman who has a law school background and owns two companies, but loves the super long-distance ironman triathlon and mountain bike race (over 160 kilometers in one day). She starts the morning at six a.m., trains for 90 minutes – sometimes as long as two hours – while her eight-year-old son is still sleeping, and sneaks in a half hour training class two evenings a week. Her mountain bike cost $7,000; road racing bike, $4,000; cycling shoes, $200; helmet, $200 – not an amount of spending that ordinary people can afford. However, her consumption and lifestyle are very different from that of China’s elite.

Why is that? From my observation, the technological content of America’s new economy is high and competition is intense, which requires the energy and initiative of young people. In the book “Training Elites,” I had described that extreme sports are a big trend in Silicon Valley. A woman who wakes up at four in the morning to practice long distance swimming said that here, 40-year-olds seem old. Therefore, people over 40 constantly have to prove themselves. If you compete in a marathon and beat a 20-something-year-old kid, others will look at you differently. In short, success means struggling and going through “the process.” Your entire lifestyle should reflect the process of such a struggle. Now, that’s cool. No wonder that in the recent direction of American life, cycling has slowly become the trend of the middle and upper class, while golf is starting to become very popular with the working class. I remember in the book “The Rise of the Creative Class,” Professor Florida mentioned that on the rivers in the U.S., motorboats are often driven by blue-collar workers, while the swish-swish sound of rowboats comes from white-collar elites.

China is another matter: Success means picking the “fruit of results” and reaping the profits; it seems that all the successful people are a part of vested interest groups. And so the culture of successful people is to put enjoyment above all else. For example, “living the easy life,” getting a foot massage and playing golf – which does not require a lot of physical strength – make them feel like they are the “upper class.” Some luxurious meetings often provide these kinds of services. Cycling, on the other hand, has become a very un-hip lifestyle. Early aging of the white-collar workers has actually become a social problem.

Individual hobbies are supposedly private. However, individual and collective hobbies reflect the style of our society to a certain extent. An innovative society stresses overcoming struggles, pushing ourselves beyond the limit and focusing not on what you already have, but on your future potential. The result is that everyone competes in sports to see who is more “extreme.” The rent-seeking society, on the other hand, turns its attention to box seats, standing in line, rank and connections; the importance of individual hobbies is based on what social resources you already have or how much was given to you. So, I worry not only about the bodily health of China’s elite class, but the health of their minds as well.