It's like Paris Except in China // Trevor Turnbow

http://www.cnn.com/travel/article/fake-paris-china/?iid=ob_article_footer_expansion

      This article chronicles a Parisian photographers sudden awareness of this city thousands of miles away in China called Tianducheng that is created to be a replica of Paris, and his subsequent pilgrimage to this town to compare his beloved home to a recreation a continent away. He takes a series of pictures of Tianducheng and places them next to similar photos in Paris, and the match is evident, sometimes it's difficult to tell which city is which. There is an Eiffel Tower, a Palace of Versailles, and a multitude of city streets all feigning the effect of it's french counterpart. He said as a Parisian being put into a place that is the same as your home, except just somewhere else is an incredibly bizarre experience. The differences in the city may not be architectural, but the attitude he says of the people towards the city, they didn't really see it as a recreation of Paris, it was just their home like any other place. Tianducheng also doesn't have the ancient feel of Paris, it doesn't have the history beneath each street, he just says it feels like another Chinese town.
        It's really an interesting thing to think about, are the people in Tianducheng going to be similar to the Parisians because they live in the same environment just give or take a few 15,000 miles, evidently this situation proved that it really is the people who make the city and not necessarily the architecture. I also just think it's so crazy somebody in China just decided to build a replica of Paris, like who does that? To just pick up a model for a city and plop it into your own country is just odd, and it just makes me wonder how many other cities out there are just copies of each other. This also shows this obsession with westernization I think exists in the world. Historically Western Civilization has been idealized by some, and in the case of Soviets and North Korea and Germany western culture was despised, but this monument to western civilization is an interesting juxtaposition between the ideals of democracy and the communism present in China.