The Rise of the Tuhao

Zheng Bijian, author of the phrase “China’s peaceful rise,” once wrote that as China’s development wins the attention of the world, it becomes increasingly important to understand its path. He explained that “economic growth alone does not provide a full picture of a country’s development. China has a population of 1.3 billion. Any small difficulty in its economic or social development, spread over this vast group, could become a huge problem.”

These words were penned 10 years ago, and in the decade since China’s social development has been stunning: brimming with ambition, globally instrumental, and touching the highest peaks of human progress. But at the very top of Chinese society, the peaks are narrow and the valleys below are deep and wide. One of the difficulties in China’s recent development is the emergence of a new social class of economic elites known as tuhao. These are China’s nouveau riche, though the term itself means something more offensive, and deservedly so.

“Tuhao” comprises the characters for “earth” and “powerful” (I prefer the translation “dirty rich”) and is an ancient reference to oppressive landlords that was given new life in 2013 when a joke went viral on the microblogging site Weibo. In the joke, a rich but unhappy young man asks a Buddhist monk for advice, to which the monk, cognizant of the young man’s wealth, replies, “Let’s be friends!” Since then, the term has been adopted into common use; the Oxford English Dictionary added “tuhao” to its 2014 edition.

Tuhao are characterized not only by their wealth, but by their ostentatious consumption habits. In September 2013, Apple released its gold-plated iPhone 5s. Rachel Lu of Tea Leaf Nation wrote: “Despite initial disbelief that Apple would indulge such tackiness alongside its Zen-like tradition of elegant design, the gilded phone has become insanely popular in China.” Netizens refer to the phone’s color as “tuhao gold,” and its popularity is unsurprising in a nation where one finds gold-plated Ferraris, Lamborghinis, Lincoln Town Car limousines (the list goes on and on).

But worse than the tuhao’s bottomless materialism is their unconscionable rudeness. One couple threw boiling water in a flight attendant’s face, screamed about their money, and said “I’m going to blow up the plane” – all because they had to wait until after takeoff for water. A wealthy Party official came “utterly undone” after being told he missed his flight, smashing boarding gate computers, and trying to break through the glass doors of the gate itself by repeatedly swinging at it with a metal stanchion. Then there were the six first class passengers who became so hostile at the thought of having to wear seat belts or turn off their mobile devices that the flight had to be suspended. In another incident, two men stole 16 bottles of wine and tried to take them ‘to go,’ then became violent once confronted, even threatening a passenger’s life.

And these are only a fraction of the cases involving air travel, not to mention the litany of post-arrival scandals. Two cases that readily come to mind are the tuhao who feasted on protected species and ignorantly advertised it with ear-to-ear grins and tags such as “catch ‘em, collect ‘em, and eat ‘em -- ha ha ha” or the man who refused to pay the public bathroom fee at a rest stop in Frankfurt, even though he “had on the same trip spent thousands of euros on a Vacheron Constantin watch.”

Naturally, rudeness isn’t limited to tuhao, nor is the phenomenon of tuhao limited to China – in a July 16 Xinhua report, United States presidential candidate Donald Trump is referred to as a tuhao – but it does appear to be a much greater problem in China, so much so the government has set up a blacklist to ban rude Chinese from travel.

Explosion of Wealth

One obvious cause of this problem is China’s recent explosion of wealth, which affords otherwise uneducated types to wield great power and, perhaps being accustomed to a society where guanxi holds more weight than rule of law, allows them to believe they can buy or influence their way out of any situation. In 2013, Radio Free Asia reported Beijing University sociology professor Xia Xueluan’s belief that the reason for such rudeness is simply that “China hasn’t caught up with its own development.”

The same report also quotes Xie Tian, professor of management at the University of South Carolina, who believes merely asking Chinese to “become more civilized” is useless. The Cultural Revolution, Xie asserts, “destroyed traditional Chinese manners.” Xie adds that “things have got even worse in the past few years, because of the extreme materialism and corruption of the Chinese Communist Party […] Under this atheist government, the moral fabric of Chinese society, its religious beliefs, and its sense of right and wrong, have pretty much disappeared.”

Vincent Weifang Ni, multimedia producer at BBC World Service, disputes this notion, saying “in China there is really not this kind of etiquette, the same level as those in Europe, those in America, for example.” However he doesn’t blame the Cultural Revolution. Rather, he says, “the Cultural Revolution ended nearly 40 years ago and the next generation’s moved on quite a bit. I think fundamentally it’s really about the difference between Chinese culture and those in the West.”

In addition to China’s economic development, history and culture, I’ve also heard people blame the tuhao phenomenon on the large population (a default excuse used to cover a multitude of sins in China) and lack of education, which lacks credibility since many tuhao enjoy the finest education money can buy.

Whatever the cause of the tuhao problem, two things give hope. First, tuhao is an insult; the existence of the term itself indicates society’s disapproval. Second, the novyye Russkiye or “new Russians” are almost identical, suggesting tuhao could be an inevitable result of post-Communist economic reform. This much is clear: Money grows faster than manners but reputations are reversible. Once upon a time, Japanese were considered lazy and Germans were thought to be too emotional. China can make a better name for itself, but Chinese need to see this as their patriotic duty. For China, time and willpower is the cure.