Why tuhao year-end bonus matters

One potent symbol of excess on the part of the American super-rich was the golden shower curtain flaunted by disgraced Tyco chief executive Dennis Kozlowski. Among China's "tuhao", or those with loads of cash but no class (or the nouveaux riches), the lust for gilt-edged items goes beyond bathroom fixtures to include underwear and shoes, as well as 18 karat gold mobile devices costing $5,513 to $6,282. In Nanjing, the extreme represented a gold-plated Infiniti G37 that was recently photographed parked outside a jewelry store.

Such stories are grist to the mill of bloggers on websites like Tea Leaf Nation, which has dubbed the tuhao as the Chinese answer to the "Beverly Hillbillies".

In a case of life imitating a bad 1960s American TV sitcom, one of the favorite tuhao haunts in Beijing is the capital's first recreational vehicle park, where one pays $330 to spend a single night, when rooms at the luxury St. Regis Hotel are available for as low as $183 a night.

The tuhao's "if you've got it, flaunt it" mentality is now finding its way into the long-standing practice of companies awarding year-end bonuses to their employees. According to a Reuters/China Stringer network story, a Guangzhou-based Internet company gave 10 Audi A4L sedans to its employees. The cars had large windshield signs, screaming, "Year-end bonus!" as they stood in the company's parking lot. Other companies have handed out Mercedes C180 sedans and gold bars as bonuses to their employees.

These rewards are in sharp contrast to the prosaic and negligible bonus given to many Chinese employees. For example, one Sina Weibo user complained that he had received an "apple notebook" - not the Apple laptop, but a plain paper notebook and piece of fruit. And after seeing the Audis with the "Year-end Bonus!" signs, an employee of a company next door declared: "This is tuhao overload. Besides being envious, we have no choice but to hate the staff of that office."

This comment underscores the socially corrosive impact of tuhao ethos and the soaring levels of socio-economic inequality in China that go with it. To start with, the combination of inequality and ostentatious display of wealth breed resentment, undermining the social harmony that Chinese society wants to preserve.