Beijing Besotted By Big Apple

Directions from Times Square to the Upper East Side: Go east on Chang'an Avenue past Tiananmen Square, then drive north on Fourth Ring Road until you see the Chaoyang Gongyuan exit. And watch out for the gridlock just before SoHo.

Looking for luxury? Buy an apartment in -- not on -- Central Park. Stop in at MOMA, where you'll find nary a Picasso or Pollock. Dine at the Four Seasons, or order some of Little Italy's fresh-made pasta. Head out to suburban Forest Hills, where you won't be seeing pro tennis matches any time soon.

As China's ancient capital gallops through a dizzying building boom and invents a modern identity, developers are borrowing the globally glamorous landmarks of Manhattan -- in Chinese, '"mahn-ha-dun'' -- as namesakes for gleaming new apartment complexes and businesses.

In the develop-it-now exuberance of today's Beijing, the attitude toward New York is a pragmatic one: If you can make it there, you can remake it anywhere -- especially here.

"When people see Park Avenue, they see New York prestige. It's fashionable, and the pinnacle of civilization, and the name conveys that,'' says Tian Yutao, a senior salesman for Park Avenue, an apartment complex rising in central Beijing.

"In Chinese culture, we don't have all these iconic names that symbolize prosperity. So we borrow,'' says Tian, an energetic 25-year-old born five years after Mao's death cleared the way for the economic reform that unleashed the current rush toward cosmopolitanism.

Modern China's paradox is this: It is an ancient culture, yet it is emerging from a recent infancy. Mao's communist vision, imposed with the 1949 revolution, branded prestige as unforgivable and shunned much of the outside world for three decades. His road to utopia didn't cross Fifth Avenue.

The capitalism steamrolling across China in his wake draws upon foreign influence to plug gaps in its recent popular culture and, in the process, is infusing Chinese with hunger for the West. A popular 1993 TV show called "Beijingers in New York" didn't hurt, either.

It means a taste for knockoffs of American products, from DKNY blouses to New York Knicks jerseys to DVDs of Manhattan-saturated TV shows like "Friends" and "Sex and the City." It means old men doing tai'chi at dawn wearing Yankees caps. It means young Chinese adopting English first names like "Harlem" to convey their savvy.

And it means an unofficial -- though hardly inadvertent -- effort to invoke New York as a PR device to leave old Peking behind.

"Beijing Chaoyang area positions to become new Manhattan," the Communist Party newspaper People's Daily said in 2000, outlining plans for the most internationally oriented sector of the city.

It is in Chaoyang where most of these glossy, glassy high-rise complexes are rising in a skyline eons away from the drab communist cinderblock villas of yore.

One ambitious complex, the Upper East Side, offers beautifully printed but incomprehensible promotional materials ("Short sense of history turn into regret of all the Chinese cities") that hammer home one theme: New York equals luxury.

The 116-acre tract will open its first apartments next year, targeted at China's nouveau riche -- foreigners and Chinese about 40 years old and working for global corporations. The average purchase price will be $185 per square foot.

"In New York, the Upper East Side has a good standard of living and tall buildings, and wealthy people live there. Our target is to reflect that,'' says Tian Tao, chief of sales. He predicts a "little city" with high-end boutiques on the first and second floors of buildings just like the real Upper East side.

But cheaper. In Manhattan's Upper East Side, apartments sell for $750 to $1,000 a square foot, rising to $2,000 and even $3,000 in the most desirable areas.

Says Tian: "This isn't just a name. The whole New York feeling will be here, including 'a coveted view out the western windows'" to Chaoyang Park, Beijing's verdant substitute for Central Park.

Up the road, the apartment complex actually named Central Park is already taking residents -- Westerners, Hong Kongers and Taiwanese with money to spend.

"I've never been to New York. I just hear about it from other people," says sales manager Wang Lin. "They say, 'I run in Central Park every morning."'

Most of Beijing's people, of course, aren't living in such top-level quarters.

The city's building boom has eradicated thousands of dilapidated courtyard homes, some hundreds of years old and without indoor plumbing. Today, many residents live in mid-rise apartment blocks that, while clean and safe, could hardly be considered luxurious.

The New York names go on: Manhattan Gardens. Forest Hills. SoHo, whose Chinese name means "`Modern City." MOMA, where real estate agents immediately tell visitors: "We're not a museum." There's Beijing Times Square: Times Square, a department store where, on the second floor, you'll find the Times Square Subway -- with six-inch meatball hoagies for 19 yuan, or about $2.40.

Across town, restaurants called Little Italy and the Four Seasons do brisk business. There's even a well-heeled China World Trade Center, complete with much shorter twin towers -- something not emphasized much in the post-Sept. 11 world. The only thing Beijing is missing, it seems, is Chinatown.

New Yorkers, though, can be difficult to impress.

"It's kind of sad. They have a chance to make China be China, but they think those names mean money," says Ray Pagnucco, a television actor and New York native who returned to Brooklyn in March after living in Beijing for three years.

"It's like the whole bootleg DVD thing," Pagnucco says. "In China today, copying gets you ahead."

If imitation means flattery, though, it's also the manifestation of something Chinese have been doing for centuries -- deftly adapting outside influences. Even the country's free-market experiment is known as "socialism with Chinese characteristics," acknowledging the fusion of the borrowed and the original.

As Beijing hurtles toward the 2008 Olympics, the touchstone of its current development frenzy, it is trying desperately to forge its own, unique brand. It has centuries of history to draw upon -- the Forbidden City, the Temple of Heaven, the Great Wall at its edge.

But in a town where a Taiwanese woman named Chen has opened a bagel bakery, a Nashville theme bar is regularly packed and one of the newest residential developments is called Yosemite, there's more room for imitation -- and lots of temptation to recruit what's already proven attractive elsewhere.

"This is an unusual cultural moment for China," says Park Avenue's Tian. "China opens up, and these things are coveted. Eventually, the allure will fade and things that are uniquely Chinese will be what's coveted. But not yet"

By Ted Anthony