What Do All These Rich Chinese Kids' Parents Do For Money?

Lol deleted

Had a guy I knew in HS whose dad was a higher up in one of the companies that manufactures some part of the iPhone (I forgot which one, he told me). He actually gave 20 people brand new iPads (not ripoffs either, the real thing). Legend has it that if you hold the iPad close to your ear, you can actually hear the misery of the workers who made it.

Edit: The guy was a total POS too. Started up "Online marketing businesses" after dropping out of college and claimed to have self made money. Chain smoking alcoholic.

Sorry Goldie, can’t help yah, but to add to the fire I’m in Europe currently. Was in Italy and now South of France and these kids are total animals. Place is a zoo. It’s like these kids have never been smacked. Running around in nice restaurants, screaming on trains, this crap didn’t fly in my day and that wasn’t even that long ago.

The smart/rich Chinese outside of China are the ones that made it out.

Go to China and most are dirt poor.

Also, Melbourne is a lot closer than the US. I went there last year too - saw a bunch of Chinese people on the tables at the casino there.

There were a ton at my school during undergrad, Lamborghini's, Ferrari's, etc. I wouldn't say they were obnoxious and rude, but they definitely kept to their wealthy Chinese circle. They'd always whisper in Chinese and cheat on exams. I'd have to guess that their families are deeply involved with the CPC, but I'm just spit-balling.

Goldie, to be fair, you're not exactly a model citizen yourself. Glass houses, stones... you think your antics were warranted abroad? By the way that's a classic stereotype in Asia about Western travelers.

I mean their families are just rich, what else? Dumb kids from rich families all over the world do the same thing. Don't bring race into this lol.

Corrupt government officials or connected with government officials. They essentially steal tax money and call it their own

Currently at a target undergrad (H/Y/P/W) with lots of wealthy international students, not just Chinese. It depends on where they're from in China because certain locations usually sway towards different industries, For example, I know there are parents that are C-suite executives or own a lot of inflated real estate. There is the "new money" group whose parents most likely started some tech company. Lastly, there is the "old money" that work for government agencies or have "famous" parents. I'm missing some people of course, but those are the main groups along with supermodels, celebrities, and news casters (yes).

That being said, a good amount of the ultra-wealthy don't tend to flaunt their money, at least from my experience. The intelligent ones know to keep it under wraps, and they rarely splurge. At most, they'll live in a luxury apartment that costs like $2500+ a month, but they don't tend to make it rain at the clubs. The ones who tend to eagerly flaunt all their money on nice cars and 6-digit accessories are doing it for social media and appearance purposes. Whether it be because they want the ultra-rich Asian girls to like them or it's to impress others, it's more or less a facade. A lot of the times, these kids don't actually have the money or financial situation to support the spending - but the parents will spend everything on the children for them to live a "good" life overseas. It's not even paycheck to paycheck - it's taking on debt. I actually know horror stories where these guys purposely acted rich to marry girls with citizenship, only for the girls to find out it was a ruse, and they're actually hit with bills.

That being said, I'm an international student myself, and I didn't come from a lavish background by any means. It sucks to be stereotyped with some of these kids, and it's often time assumed I can afford to eat out multiple times a week and blow $50+ on every meal. I'm still on the dining plan because it's the most bang for my buck with the % discount and conversions...

Import export

Parents' money - much of it is manufacturing, real estate, and starting businesses. You have to realize it's a BIG country, and economy was starting from scratch 30 years ago. During that time, there were many industries that evolved and businesses built.
Those that won in their respective industries made bank. If one invested in real estate, there was also a lot of value created there as well.

At uni (undergrad) I lived with a Chinese dude. Super nice, never showed off his money with bad intent or anything. But he would spend a fortune without thought. We had a flat dinner just to meet everyone on one of the first nights and he brought a £1000+ bottle of wine just to say thanks for inviting him for food. Turns out his parents owned a confectionery company and clearly have made a lot of money from it. I remember him saying one guy who he knew had a parent who owned a company which made the stuffing for pillows.

Fast forward a few years to my masters course; I'm the only non-international student. ~80% are Chinese (a lot specifically from HK). ~15% Europeans (Greek/Swede/Norwegian for example) and ~4.5% from South America (mostly Columbia). The portion of those who stood out were always the students from China. I've never encountered so many 21-25 year olds wearing watches worth ~£20k, Gucci shoes and the like.

One sad part was they were so oblivious to the fact they stood out. I remember sitting in a Cafe and a dude was counting out at least £5k in cash (Cafe was next to a bank) without concern of someone seeing him and being identified as an easy target for theft.

The fact they were wealthy enough to go abroad to study, then pay international fees and then have materialistic goods obviously put them in the 0.1% of the Chinese population, but just the wealth they had was immense. Like someone commented above, I typically put this down to a majority of new industries having taken off within the past 2-5 generations. That said, I've no doubt be surprised if a few were wealthy from 'good connections'.

Thank god you aren't a politician otherwise your whole family would be getting shit on for being racist for this

I know this is not the most PC thread but an interesting question. I am friends with a Chinese exchange student at my university and he tells me that 95% of Chinese students studying in America have parents who are usually gov officials, high class biz people. SJWs like to complain about how unfair America is but look into China's entrance exams(Jack Ma failed 4 times) and merit system. Koreans also tend to live a bourgeoise lifestyle because of how stratified their economics are. If you are born rich you will stay that way. Ive seen Koreans in lines outside Burberry. You mention being in Melbourne and seeing a lot of Chinese. Interesting, because the Chinese are buying land in very strange markets : Caribbean, South America, South Pacific.

It's China with 1.4 billion people. You could invent dick flavoured bubble gum and if you sell it to 1 million people for more than 1 dollar a pop you could become a millionaire. In China literally anything goes. A Chinese kid at my high school was the son of a man who owned 2-3 factories where they made clothes for some obscure European brands. Millionaire.

I will ignore your vapid and massive oversimplification of an entire nation of 1.4 billion ppl and attempt to answer your question.

To understand the phenomenon of 'swarms' of stupidly wealthy int'l Chinese students requires going back to the cultural revolution and the truly hard line communist days. Back then, all workers, even those in positions of relative power / respect made the same money regardless of profession.

Once Mao died and Deng Xiaoping rose to power, he quickly began enacting sweeping progressive and capitalistic economic policies which returned the private markets back to China, and allowed formerly state-owned enterprises (more importantly... LAND) to be sold to citizens, often at steep discounts or dirt cheap prices. Remember, this came not too long after a time in which being labeled as a 'landlord' was essentially a death sentence.

As you can imagine, many many people suddenly went from making a marginal income to having substantial assets. When you consider how long it usually takes to build wealth in families, this was happening on a massive national scale, and over a relatively short period of time. The regional factory director in charge of imports / exports was now profiting massively, and the uneducated yet enterprising rural farmer in some cases was now able to come into large plots of land.

On the other end of this spectrum of course is the Communist Party. Civil service in China goes a long way back, and is deeply rooted in ruthlessly selective and competitive test taking. As such, to make it into the contemporary party today follows a similarly difficult path, and is incredibly lucrative.

Fast forwarding to today, I'd say many of these kids' parents' backgrounds follow a similar story - you managed to endure the countless senseless purges of the cultural revolution and be rewarded by sweeping economic reforms, or you earned your keep in the party after siding with the communists during the war while ALSO managing to avoid the countless senseless purges of the cultural revolution, climbed up in the party ranks, and then be rewarded by all the trappings that come with such a rarefied position of power.

Even though only a fraction of Chinese actually realized this economic blessing, when applied to a denominator of over a billion people, this still comes out to a lot. As for the rest that you don't see... as of 5-6 years ago, the migrant worker population of China alone was ~300 million people, which goes to highlight the scale of what you see today.

As for their hopes and aspirations, I can only imagine. Perhaps it involves never having to endure a devastating famine which killed 50 million people out of political negligence and ineptitude, or being killed for being educated / wealthy. Due to the one child policy, perhaps they just love to spoil them as parents of only children tend to do, maybe at the expense of teaching manners that went by the wayside after their own forcible relocation to the countryside for 're-education' in their youth. I know that if i somehow crawled through that mile of shit that was the mao era and emerged clean (and rich) on the other side, i wouldn't GAF what my kid did as long as he lived the good life like 'Ye.

Who knows.