Big Red Ferrari Wins in Land of Little Red Book

Glitzy Grand Prix Symbolizes China's Embrace of Wealth

Chinese children with Formula One flags march during the opening ceremony of the Grand Prix at the $350 million Shanghai International Circuit racetrack. (Kim Kyung-hoon -- Reuters)

SHANGHAI, Sept. 26 -- If any doubts remained that China has turned its back on socialist equality for the masses, they faded in the exhaust fumes Sunday as Rubens Barrichello's flaming red Ferrari F1 shrieked past the checkered flag before thousands of fans at the first annual Chinese Grand Prix.

The Formula One race -- high-risk capitalists fielding half-million-dollar cars that whined around a $350 million circuit for spectators who paid as much as $400 a ticket -- represented the antithesis of the ascetic communism that China once enforced at home and advocated abroad. Now, after more than two decades of economic reform and booming growth, wealthy Chinese are refining and indulging a taste for luxury, conspicuous consumption and status.

"I think Beijing and Shanghai should concentrate on things like this," said Jacky Zhang, 40, chief financial officer for a Shanghai printing equipment firm who watched the field race at speeds of up to 200 mph. "It means we have enough money to play the game."

Formula One is not the only measure of the changing times. Rich Chinese whose parents were taught that ostentation is a political crime wear Ferragamo pantsuits and Gucci sunglasses to dine at Jean-Georges, a few floors up from the Armani store at Three on the Bund, one of Shanghai's most fashionable addresses. Dinner for two Saturday night at the packed T-8, a trendy spot around the corner from the little brick building where the Chinese Communist Party held its first national congress in 1921, went for $260 with a sturdy Amarone.

The hard-to-get tables were a short distance from the new dealership where Ferrari has predicted it will sell 50 street cars this year at $150,000 and up. BMW has calculated that China already is the world's biggest customer for its top-of-the-line 760Li V12; Cadillac recently announced that it, too, wants in on the luxury market. In case any of the new car owners need luggage, Louis Vuitton seized on Formula One week to celebrate the expansion of its shop here to 9,700 square feet, making it the biggest of 11 in China.

"China is a big country, and we have so many ways of getting rich," declared Rose Tan, who edits Autostyle magazine and is one of China's few female race drivers.

Tan had no time for the apparent conflict between Formula One's heritage of rich men playing with expensive toys and China's own heritage of share-and-share-alike communism. "If it's an international event, and China is a big country, then we should have it," she said.

For Tan and many other Chinese, the only false note in Sunday's Formula One race was that there was no Chinese driver and no Chinese team. But people in Shanghai have begun work on that.

The race Sunday, attended by more than 150,000 people in perfect fall weather, seemed to be the latest, and perhaps the most flagrant, demonstration of a new Chinese ethic more at home on Wall Street than in Tiananmen Square. In fact, China's embrace of Formula One was organized on behalf of a government-owned holding company by a Communist Party functionary assigned to promote the automobile industry and world-class Shanghai.

"I'm a Communist Party member, so the party's assignment for me is always number one," said Yu Zhifei, vice president of Shanghai International Circuit and the race's main promoter. Organizing the Formula One race for Shanghai was his official duty rather than his passion, he said in an interview, adding: "Myself, I like music and literature."

Yu dismissed the idea that Formula One racing was out of place in China, even though this is a nominally communist country where annual per capita income just passed $1,000. Wearing designer jeans and suede slip-ons for an interview overlooking the Bund, a stretch along the Huangpu River fabled early in the 20th century as a center of European commerce, Yu, 52, described Formula One racing in China as "healthy and positive."

"It's good for the national economy and good for the tourist business," he added, eons away from the dirt-poor village where the party sent him during the Cultural Revolution in the 1970s to learn from the peasants. "The only thing is that it is very high-end. The masses think of it as distant from them because it is so high-end."

Ding Wei, a recent high school graduate in Beijing, complained to the China Youth Daily newspaper about the high price of tickets, saying he tried to save up to attend Sunday's race but, with the cost of travel, it proved beyond his means. "To me, it was too much to afford," he said. "I prepared 5,000 yuan [about $650] but it was still not enough."

The days when Chinese dutifully pedaled their bicycles to low-paying jobs wearing identical Mao suits and learned about self-abnegation in the Little Red Book have long since given way to the late Deng Xiaoping's discovery in the 1980s that "to be rich is glorious." But most of China's 1.3 billion people live in a world far removed from Formula One. More than half have not left the farm. Premier Wen Jiabao has warned repeatedly that the government should work to narrow the huge gap between China's new rich and those left behind, particularly farmers and laid-off workers from sunken state-owned factories.

How much attention the government should pay to this problem reportedly has been a source of tension between Wen and President Hu Jintao on one hand and, on the other, former president Jiang Zemin. But to hear the cheering here Sunday as the cars snarled around the new suburban racing circuit, the extravagance of automobile racing was not part of the problem.

"Just look around you," said Al Fayao, 18, a chemistry student whose father gave him the money to realize his dream of seeing an F1 race. "There are so many people here. Chinese like this kind of thing. It's very expensive, but it's worth it."

Yu's organization promoted the race relentlessly for months to help shape such opinion, not a hard task in a country where new car sales, 1.8 million last year, have been forecast to hit 5.6 million a decade from now. With his encouragement, newspapers printed special sections to guide the fans. Roads were lined with outdoor advertising. Government television stations ran introductory programs and interviewed drivers.

As with Beijing's plans to host the Olympics in 2008, Shanghai's staging of the Formula One, the first in a six-year contract, also reflected a desire among many Chinese to be recognized as a modern country. With many foreigners in the crowd, the race seemed another affirmation that China's years of ideological extremism and isolation are over.

Michael Schumacher, the renowned Ferrari driver who has already won this year's championship but finished 12th Sunday, said in a pre-race interview with Chinese reporters that the fascination also reflected an embrace of the individual freedom that cars represent around the world.

Schumacher may not have intended to make a political statement, but he hit on a sensitive topic. Despite economic liberalization that has created the new class of high-rolling Chinese, the government has maintained strict controls on political life, curtailing freedoms of assembly and expression to prevent any challenge to the Communist Party's monopoly on power.