Chinese in Porsche Fever – Touring the Black Forest with High Fliers

A film by Frank Sieren
30 minute documentary
First broadcast: 07.10.2009 on ARD
Just under a dozen Chinese Porsche owners are traveling to Germany for the first time – to drive Porsche. At 1000 Euro per person they travel in convoy through the Black Forest, then the Swiss Alps over Italy to Munich. They spend the night at the best hotels that Europe can offer. The mostly young, newly rich Chinese cruise on German motorways without speed limits for the first time, and curve along the secluded mountain roads in the Black Forest with droning engines.
The high fliers are doing themselves proud, in the middle of a world-wise crisis, which has even hit Porsche with full force. They are unperturbed: “The financial crisis has affected industry, but it hardly affects a nation with culture”, says Shi Lei in his mid-thirties, a car dealer from Kunming, a city of five million, which lies far down in the south-west of the country on a 2000 meter elevated plateau. We accompany the wealthy Chinese back home and have look around in their area: How did they make it to the top in the most populated country in the world, which is booming like no other despite the crisis? And at whose expense?