Orange County, China

"A guard wearing a one-size-too-big military uniform salutes my driver through the gate at the grand entrance to Orange County. Suddenly we're transported from China to, well, somewhere else. Where, exactly, is hard to say. It would be strange enough if Orange County, this gated community near the Beijing airport, were the straight-up replica of Southern California it claims to be. But it is stranger than that. The development, 45 minutes up the freeway from Beijing's better-known Forbidden City, has the appearance of a Disney theme park where someone mixed up all the different sections-a smidgen of Epcot's faux Paris intermingled with Main Street U.S.A.'s Americana.

At Orange County, California-style ranch houses sit alongside English Tudors and a French-style formal garden complete with stately fountains (turned off for the winter). The street signs of weathered wood held together with rusty spikes conjure the Old West of Durango while the community clubhouse, called the Rive Gauche Town Center, has a mansard roof typical of a French country estate. The totem poles inside recall the Pacific Northwest and the fireplace mantlepiece is carved in the shape of English-language books, including Hamlet, Macbeth, and the erroneously titled Moby-Dock. So far from the West, the distinctions between France and America, let alone Colorado and California, get lost.

[Some] critics...see the development as emblematic of China's burgeoning car culture and its wholehearted embrace of environmentally destructive growth. The journalist Ted Conover tsk-tsked in The New York Times that while China rushes to build 'new gated communities, new themed enclaves, all for the car-owning class, [what is] conspicuously missing [is] a corresponding investment in mass transit, in public spaces, and public access.' As China industrializes, many fear that the country is making the same environmental mistakes the United States made a century ago, worrying that the planet cannot sustain such an onslaught from its most populous nation.

If Orange County is to be typical of development in the new China, it would seem that the world's most populous country is hurtling toward a dystopian future-and taking the rest of the planet with it."