hey guys welcome back to foreign reacts so i saw a video and it has a really weird title and i'm
just kind of confused you guys can let me know more about the situation but i'm not sure about
the size of china but before all of that let's let me tell you guys a title the title is why china is
building their own europe i'm moving to europe i don't want to land in the wrong europe right
i'm just playing i know i couldn't do that but this is a weird ass title so we're going
to be checking out that video but before we do that i want to say thank you for the
support to um from all of the um persons who are subscribed to my patreon i literally have now 14
uh persons who are currently subscribed to my patreon i'll leave a link for my patreon
my instagram and personal email where you guys can reach out to me or support the channel
uh in the uh in a pin comment so you guys can go check it out but um i just want to say that
i appreciate all the love and support let's check out this video because it's it's a weird title and
i like that i kind of like the fact that it's a weird title but anyways guys let's get right
into that this is not the eiffel tower and this is not the famous chancellisse i know it looks like
it but these buildings structures and avenues not in france but in a country almost 8 000 kilometers
away that country being china everything here down to the lampposts and street signs are
designed to make you feel like you're in paris and surprisingly it's not just for show people
can live here and they do 30 000 people reside in this strange city but strangest of all
is the fact that just two hours from here you'll find sushi city that resembles london quite a bit
and places like these can be found all over china so you're probably wondering why it's pretty weird
i mean the united states also has a copy of the eiffel tower but china is building entire
cities what's going on here well it all started with the one city nine towns the brainchild of
former shanghai mayor shendingru and the shanghai planning commission it was set up as a way to ease
the population congestion in the city by drawing people out to the suburbs each of the nine towns
were meant to mimic an economic or culturally popular western neighborhood or city now as to
why they wanted to mimic the west and not just build them in a typical chinese style well it
has to do with profits see these aren't cheap knockoffs budgets ran from 200 to 900 million
dollars which was justified because the projected profits from tourism would be the driving force
at least that's what they thought but let's not get ahead of ourselves here
let's first see what these towns are all about now seven of the nine towns were actually built
giving potential residents the option of moving to spain germany switzerland the netherlands and
of course england all while remaining in china so let's say you moved to terms guys why is this
so weird i don't know it's really weird have you guys ever heard of this before because i'm
pretty sure most of y'all probably didn't i hope mostly i didn't because i didn't know about this
this is actually really wild i would actually want to visit that but
is china a safe place to go to like i've always i'm really concerned about safety like
i don't know is it a safe place to visit like i don't know y'all let me know though this is what
you'd find a compilation of britain's greatest architecture set up on the outskirts of shanghai
in seongjiang district thames town took 330 million us dollars and three years to make
these people went as far as importing lamp posts from england on top of that it has iconic british
figures like so winston churchill princess diana and of course harry potter immortalized in statue
form all in all thames town is meant to house 10 000 residents and host thousands of tourists eager
to see the oddness of it all the strategy worked at least initially see the novelty generated a
ton of free press which made investors flock to grab this once in a lifetime opportunity buying
property at ridiculous rates in anticipation of a large future profit a profit that never
came you'll notice a rather eerie detail in the first duplicate monuments and towns the streets
are largely empty it's the defining factor that easily differentiates the real from the fake most
of these multi-million dollar dupes didn't live up to that developers expectations and you can
probably guess why it's a hard sell for residents and the high prices don't help sure they sold some
of them in the millions but they were mostly second homes for well our families looking to
expand their real estate portfolio this created a real estate bubble which is when speculation high
spending and high demand hikes up prices of homes until nobody but the altar rich can afford it most
of the time the altar rich don't even live here so nobody is feeding into these many economies
they're just a bunch of houses and businesses that aren't creating long-lasting employment beyond
their construction let's take the case of luandin newtown 25 kilometers from shanghai an original
member of the one city nine towns team it was supposed to be a mock version of sweden's historic
and beautiful siktuna town they even hired a swedish architecture firm just to get things
right but that very factor like isn't it illegal that's what i want to know like is that legal
to literally copy like a city of another country is that legal like i get it if you put an object
but like the entire infrastructure you just copy it like is that even
like is that even legal what but why well the architects didn't account for the important
chinese architectural element of feng's way and how it would influence investment so those who
did purchase ended up bulldozing buildings to fit feng shui principles which led to a mess of a town
today luadin seems to be slowly crawling out of its ghost town days mostly due to the population
pushed from growing shanghai but it hasn't reached investors potential yet these architectural dupes
also led to some frustration and mixed reviews from the home countries some saw it as a form
of bizarre mockery even thames town consultant anthony mckay labelled it a comical facade of the
real thing the same happened when the austrian town of halstadt popped up in the guangdong
province it doesn't have the alpine landscape or the unesco world territory attack but it
comes pretty close to the real deal the accuracy matches the 940 million dollar bill funded by a
chinese mining tycoon developers flew researchers architects and photographers to the original
location to document and study the structures and layouts in depth it's a formula that would be used
throughout china's tube cities once back the mix of chinese and foreign architects got to work this
wasn't met with the excitement from some austrians however when plans for hellstarts version 2 were
revealed in 2011. some people criticized it as tacky but hellstart's mayor alexander schuch saw
it as an opportunity to foster positive relations between the two countries he even attended the
opening with a delegation and since then china and austria seem to have created a bond over the
shared town i guess the reception depends on which country's architecture the chinese decide to copy
italy was pleased with the duplication of frenchia village probably because it was made by an italian
developer located near tianjin port city the dub is more of an extremely well-built high-end
shopping mall to be honest i mean the shopping center covers 50 acres and has 200 albeit stores
there's even a colosseum now what's interesting is that the chinese government is cracking down
on these cities and there's a simple reason for that a chinese geographical survey
found that the traditional names of over 400 000 villages have been replaced with foreign ones
sounding the alarm on western influence in response china state council and the communist
party's central committee released a document that rejected the building and planning of architecture
that's quote oversized xenocentric and weird as well as lacking cultural tradition it occurred
earlier comments from president xi jinping who called for quote no more weird architecture which
probably referred to the european citizens despite the vague language oh yeah and they also banned
gated communities which knockoff towns really love so since the chinese government isn't a
fan of all this i'd say the reason these european replicas have popped up over the country is likely
due to the nation's emergence from historically suppressed creativity combined with a lot of money
to burn after a couple of decades under the strict communist rule established in 1949 china was
looking more like a monetary and cement bloc than a thriving multifaceted country many traditional
culturally rich and diverse structures had been torn down in favor of bland pragmatic designs
like this it was a communist thing remnants of the same cold buildings can be found in former soviet
states but as the 90s rolled in traditional communism in the region was on its last leg
china blossomed with the reopening of the shanghai stock market in 1990 something that hadn't been
done since 1949 with new cash flow from global trade and a less strict government when it came
to building styles developers went all out the idea was simple imitate structures that signified
wealth and success something china was eager to show it also didn't hurt that culturally mimicking
architecture was seen as a way of showing just how technologically become sort of like a trophy so
they ended up choosing europe but anyway that's it for this video thank you for
watching and i'll see you in the next one today i don't know man i don't know i don't know how
how you can knock somebody off like that but hey that's that's just what they do over there over
there in china so all the best for them man but um yeah i'm out of here y'all let me know if you
knew about this because i didn't know about it and uh i'm kind of happy it's not you know continuing
because yeah it's kind of weird no offense it's kind of weird i i don't really necessarily
appreciate that in terms of like an extent like if you want to do like one city one like i i get
it but like a consistent thing where you're trying to you know monetize off of it in such a heavy way
where you're trying to copy everything bro that's kind of weird like but if you're just
i think if they're just trying to you know like copy the tower like a mini version of
that tower or something that's totally fine but to copy the tower the buildings everything like
that's just too far of copy for me bro but it is what it is man anyways guys i'm out of here peace