I did not know who Ben Wood was when I pulled up the cushy, black barstool at his chic martini bar, DR, in the Shanghai entertainment playland he has built. He immediately set out to educate me. “Let me tell you a crazy story,” he said, leaning into my personal space and draping a thick, soft hand on the nape of my neck. He proceeded to describe, in leisurely tones, how he had stopped for a sandwich at the Kentucky Fried Chicken in Kunming Airport when a man sat down next to him and began smoking a cigarette.
He paused for effect.
It should be noted that people in China regularly smoke in restaurants, and with little or no concern for the anti-smoking sentiments of their fellow diners. But Wood didn’t like this guy’s nerve. And so, he recounted, he asked the guy to refrain. The smoker continued to chatter away on his cell phone. Incensed, Wood reached over, grabbed the man’s wrist, plucked the cigarette from his 
mouth, and ground it out into the table.
The smoker finished his phone call, and then stood up and began screaming. So Wood stood as well, drawing himself up to his full American-built height and thrusting forward his barrel chest, and offered to fight the man.
Good thing the guy finally stood down, said Wood. “The poor guy didn’t stand a chance, he was about half my size.” Story completed, masculinity firmly established, Wood leaned back and wrapped his arm around the waist of the indifferent, slender Asian woman smoking and sipping cocktails at his side.
Ben Wood is famous here in Shanghai, and increasingly, throughout the world. Once based in Boston, the architect was hand-picked by billionaire Hong Kong developer Vincent Loh to turn the site of the first conference of the Communist Party of China into a capitalist playground for wealthy adults, called Xintiandi, or “New Heaven on Earth.”
Wood received only one vote at the board meeting to develop the place, he told me, but that vote was Vincent Loh’s. Six years after its opening, the wildly successful boutiques and cafe district has become the model for similar entertainment complexes all over China. Flanked on all sides by looming glass buildings, investment properties of the likes of Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan, and the shells of would-be five-star hotels begun but not finished by overeager American-born investors, Xintiandi is a maze of stone pathways, restored traditional shikumen buildings, and European-style plazas.
On any given night of the week, leggy models and moneyed expats gather in its bars, restaurants, and cafes, seeing and being seen. With its sleek, packaged, restored historicity, Xintiandi seems like a cross between Colonial Williamsburg and Manhattan’s Meatpacking District. (Colonial Williamsburg was something of a vanity project for the Rockefellers, who “restored” the former colonial capital city to an imagined former glory, replacing hardscrabble vegetable plots with manicured English-style gardens and transforming dank roads festering with sewage and manure into sandy, tree-lined promenades.)
This reference is not lost on Wood, as Shanghai and its surrounding cities are rife with new Chinese Rockefellers, who need just a little bit of guidance into how to live the good life, à la Americain. “Shanghai has always been a world city. A world city dormant, asleep for 40 years, and it has just woken up.” And Wood is well-placed to be China’s crowing rooster for the pleasures of extreme wealth.
On the evening we met, Wood had just returned from signing a lucrative deal for one of these Rockefellers—a power tools magnate, who had asked Wood to design him a private luxury island. Most of China’s billionaires, said Wood, w
ere unschooled in the art of living, staining their teeth with cheap tobacco, pouring cheap cognac down their throats, entertaining themselves with tawdry karaoke parties.
But this man, he said, was different. He wanted to know how to live.
He had built a successful company, made scads of money, and now he wanted to do something else. Wood was impressed at the man’s interest in self-improvement. But the billionaire in question had never driven a British sports car, ridden in a private plane, or owned a yacht. Heaven forbid.
Wood has taken him on as a personal charge. “I’m his lifestyle coach,” he grinned. The following morning, he and his charge would be flying to a yacht show, where he was going to show the man how to select a “real” yacht, not the tacky white plastic abomination he had originally planned to buy.
This is, of course, mere philanthropy on Wood’s part. “I already have all these things.” Which things? Well, all of them: the fancy cars, the private planes, the luxury yachts, homes on Martha’s Vineyard and in Shangri-la.
Wood’s charmed life shows no signs of slowing down. Earlier in the day, in Suzhou, a short ride from Shanghai, Wood said he’d just signed a deal for “more money than I’ve ever made in my life.” In addition to the private island, he’ll be designing mansions for as many as 80 of his friend’s associates. “I can’t believe I’m getting paid to show this guy how to live!” he chuckled.
Wood closed out the evening with one more story. He had just traveled to Yunnan Province with a bevy of lovely women (earlier in the evening it had been five, now it was three), and one evening he had organized a cocktail hour on a terrace of the restored villa where they were staying. He told the women to dress and meet him on the terrace at dusk, and there, they were greeted by a handsome young man bearing chilled cocktails. “Just as we reached for our glasses, a rainbow appeared in the sky,” said Wood. One of the women was so moved, he said, that she cried.
It’s a good life. But while Wood is incredibly wealthy and successful, he is also perhaps an example of a new modality in the relationship between the East and West. Rather than the exploitative power games of the colonialist, the extractive hunger of earlier capitalists, the anxious fanaticism of the missionary, or the parental condescension of the international developmentalist, we now find ourselves in the midst of a sociocultural bartering between people with equal wealth and status—but with different ideas of how to enjoy it.
Naturally, Wood and his billionaire mentees are caricatures of the types of mutual exchanges that take place between peoples from different cultures, but they do reflect a changing dynamic. As China’s influence expands, as it reinvents and redefines city life, Shanghai, its most cosmopolitan city, may not quite be “heaven on earth” but if Wood has anything to do with it, the cobblestone streets of Xintiandi will be paved with gold.
Kavitha Rajagopalan is a senior fellow of the World Policy Institute and the author of Muslims of Metropolis: The Stories of Three Immigrant Families in the West.