Illustration: Liu Rui/GT

Months ago, I bought a protective cover for my iPhone. It was dark purple with a golden fringe. Almost all my friends teased me about my vulgar taste. But today, maybe they'd want to get closer to me.

Such gaudy displays are a mark of the tuhao, a term spreading like wildfire on Chinese social networks to designate the newly rich and powerful.

It lends itself to many interpretations; you might translate it as "billionaire hillbilly," "land baron," or simply nouveau riche.

The word became popular almost overnight. As Rachel Lu put it in the US Foreign Policy magazine, while tu means dirt or uncouth and hao means splendor, the combination now indicates "the artistic sensibilities of the arriviste, the social grace of the parvenu, and the spending habits of the nouveau riche."

Such words don't appear out of nowhere, and the kind of detailed examination Foreign Policy gave to it is valuable. These terns serve as the mirror through which not only foreign media but also we ourselves observe and understand China's new realities.

Tuhao used to mean "local despots," and referred to landlords or warlords who prospered through exploitation and criminality. But today, it often means those who got rich off the booming property market in recent years by speculating in housing prices.

Maybe there are some of the same implications there, given the dubious nature of property deals in China. These people aren't entrepreneurs or hardworking office workers, but speculators who had the right connections at the right time.

And as with the nouveau riche in Europe, they can spend lavishly on everything, such as the newly introduced gold version of the iPhone 5, but their money doesn't buy proper taste.

Deep in our minds, we actually despise tuhao, who only pursue materialistic rather than spiritual values, who see only money but have no sense of moral standards and cultural refinement and civility, and who blindly chase after the latest in luxury brands regardless of quality or cost.

Nonetheless, on China's social networks, there have been netizens calling for making friends with tuhao in order to get the benefits of such connections.

Friends might call each other tuhao jokingly, but nobody really wants to be labeled with the term. On the other hand, secretly or openly, many people would rather be vulgar and have money, than be cultivated and poor.

Such contradiction, sadly, goes to the root of the social conflicts that accompany China's ambitions to remake itself.

When the road leading to success seems to become narrow and people lose confidence in changing their fate through knowledge or personal capabilities, they have to recognize tuhao's emergence.

Having the right connections with tuhao seems to be a shortcut to success. Although not glorious and solid, it is better than struggling at the lowest end of society.

Of course people do not hate wealth. They just hate the way wealth is distributed and that wealth goes to those who don't know how to use it well. The old Chinese saying, "inequality is worse than deficiency," is still a powerfully resonant one today.

Wealth alone does not help the whole of Chinese society to real affluence. With inequality growing and the ladders that the poor were once able to climb to success being kicked away by the new elite, it only brings artistic, cultural, and spiritual vulgarity.

Jokes online are all very well, but these are real social problems that we need to face head-on, rather than just coining new terms to entertain ourselves.

And if we can face these problems realistically, then maybe the reports in foreign media about Chinese tuhao won't have quite the satirical edge they do now.

The author is a freelancer based in Beijing. opinion@globaltimes.com.cn