Hainan Residents Wake to News of Alien Invasion

Notes from a Small Island
Sanya, Hainan, China

We didn’t much enjoy our day in the sun. Or the star, for that matter. The San Fernando Valley Sun, The Malaysia Star… we were probably in the Mount Pleasant Daily Tribune and the Cootamundra Herald as well, for all we knew. For a while in February, Hainan Island was big news.

We had people calling from all over the place to tell us what was happening in our own back yard. The local government had announced plans to transform Hainan into an “International Tourism Island“. Property prices in Sanya had doubled overnight.

“It’s the Wenzhou crowd,” said Old Jiang, calling from Shanghai. “They had to get their money out of Dubai and the government had just banned private ownership of coal mines in Shaanxi. So they had all of this money.

“Then they saw that announcement about an international tourism island. It’s in all the newspapers.”

I breathed heavily into the phone. Outside, kites fluttered in the same tropical sky. Boats nodded in the same quiet bay. But I was feeling a good deal less proprietorial about what we thought of as “our beach”.

“You should have bought an apartment,” said Old Jiang, with a final twist of the knife.

There are three new property developments within fifty metres of our (rented) apartment here in Dadonghai. In each case, there is nothing there but a thoroughly-worked hole in the ground and a glitzy sales office showing models of glittering high-rise homes for ants.

In each case, the properties are fully sold out. With subsequent construction phases racked up years in advance… all sold out.

Meanwhile, in the shops of Dadonghai, tumbleweeds are blowing through the aisles.

“It’s very silent,” said Yarig at the surf wear shop. “I’ve never seen business this bad before.”

“But what about all these rich people coming through?” asked The Bounceologist hopefully.

“They say they come in the night,” said Yarig, who could just as easily have been talking about aliens or swamp monsters.

“They land at two in the morning and go straight from the airport to start queuing at the property offices.

“Really, this is the first year I’ve seen shops closing down before the peak season. They already know they won’t be able to pay next year’s rent.”

We may be a little tropical island, but we are still part of the global village. You get the strangest distortions when the world’s governments take to printing money. Fortunes are created and destroyed in an instant.

At our regular blogger’s convention, Mario was turning green. Mario is a tall and emphatic New Yorker who delivers every sentence eye-to-eye, with vigorously waving hands to illustrate the point – which is fine, except that he also does this while driving… in a small car that he fits into like a badly-folded deck chair. Our blogger’s convention mainly involves the two us sitting in Coffee World, laptops between us, taking turns with desultory searches on Google.

“I’m sick,” said Mario after pulling up a recipe for bread made with rice and tapioca flour. “From Haikou all the way down to Sanya, property prices have relocated to outer space. I’m a million and a half poorer than I should have been, and all of these people are calling me to ask if they should sell their apartments.”

Mario has two friends with apartments in Sanya Bay, one American and one German. Both want to know if it is time to sell. Another American friend in Haikou bought an apartment two weeks ago and has just received an offer for more than twice what he paid.

Mario owned an apartment in Dadonghai, but sold it too soon. Down but not discouraged, he is determined to be right on time for the next bubble. He has bought an apartment in Shenyang, Manchuria.

“Please, please, let the Wenzhou crowd fly up and do their thing in Shenyang. What are they, like birds or locusts or what? Whatever it is that they do, just let them go on up and do that thing in Shenyang.”

Meanwhile, The Bounceologist, shades in place, is scanning the relentlessly blue skies for a puff of cloud, and clinging for consolation to the words of Andy Xie, the mad voice in the wilderness, a man who brings hope to the little people.