Page - 163 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

163 #Hallstatt In 2012, Austrians were made aware that cloning was no longer merely the stuff of blockbuster films, nor restricted to sheep and CGI-generated dinosaurs. Rather, they learned that when it comes to places, it has become something of a Chinese speciality. Much to the shock of its citizens, who numbered 778 as of January 1, 2018, but were slightly more numerous in 2012, Hallstatt, a tiny, über-picturesque village in Austria’s Salzkam- mergut, a tourist region “famous for its pristine alpine scenery, lakes, mountains, and church steeples towering over villages and small towns” (Reisenleitner 2017, 201–2), was turned into what Bianca Bosker, in Original Copies: Architectural Mimicry in Contemporary China, calls a “simulacrascape” (4): a themed en- vironment built to look like a famous site in “the West.” Called “Hallstatt See — Huizhuo” [五矿·哈施塔特], the “made in Chi- na” gated-community version of Hallstatt came about rather by chance. The wife of the CEO of Minmetals Land Inc., the real estate branch of China’s largest metals trader, was often in Aus- tria as she was a huge fan of classical music, and upon visiting Hallstatt, she was so taken by its beauty that she convinced her husband to replicate it (Fischer-Schreiber 2014). Hallstatt See was built at an estimated cost of us$ 940 million (Zeveloff and Johnson 2012) and located in Boluo, a city of 820,000 that has been described as “a run down sort of place with a factory town feel” (Shepard 2012b). Boluo is in turn in the larger, 4.6 million municipality of Huizhou, a two-hour drive north of Hong Kong in the booming industrial heartland of China’s southern Guang- dong province on the South China Sea. Paradoxically, the original Austrian Hallstatt has managed to maintain its uniqueness by being copied. It serves as the culmi- nation of this study because the way it has responded to being turned into a simulacrascape is instructive in its postmodern pragmatism and lack of clonophobia, the fear of cloning that W.T.J. Mitchell addresses in Cloning Terror: The War of Imag- es, 9/11 to the Present. Generic, “usual suspect” Chinese “copy towns” exist in multiples, such as Chengdu’s British Town, which was completed in 2005 and modelled on Dorchester (Pat- erson 2011); Thames Town just outside Shanghai — a prototypi-