LOS ANGELES _ Rudy Rong took a seat at a table in the Commerce Casino's poker hall, his legs jigging with nervous energy.
The son of Chinese video game billionaires hadn't come here to gamble. Rong was launching a virtual reality startup, and he had arrived hours earlier to videotape a musical performance in the casino's ballroom for an investor demo.
But as Ping An, a pop star and former contestant in the singing show "Voice of China," took the mic, Rong grew anxious, left the camera running onstage and retreated downstairs to the poker tables.
As he tossed a $100 bill on the green felt, his phone's glow illuminated bags under his eyes. His startup's app would be launching in a month, and he had been pushing himself hard, packing his schedule with coding sessions, media appearances and investor meetings.
As one of China's fuerdai _ the scions of the country's new wealthy class famous throughout the world for flashy spending and fast cars _ Rong wants to prove he can do more than inherit money.
A stack of chips appeared in front of him.
The game is No Limit Texas Hold 'Em, and when it came time for Rong to make his last bet before the dealer showed the final card, he took another look at his hand.
The odds of Rong getting another spade, completing a flush and winning the hand, were low.
But so are the odds of a 22-year-old University of Southern California student launching a successful startup. To win at anything, Rong believes, you must gamble.
He pushed "all in."
The dealer flipped a queen of clubs. Another $100 gone.
Rong frowned and reached for his wallet.
In recent years, Porsches, Lamborghinis and Ferraris have become common sights outside certain hot pot restaurants in California's San Gabriel Valley.
Behind the wheels of these cars are fuerdai like Rudy, a generation born in the aftermath of China's economic miracle, with every imaginable resource at their disposal.
For many in China, the fuerdai symbolize the values lost in the modernizing country's mad dash for economic growth: diligence, humility and restraint.
Their exploits make headlines across the world and read like a cautionary tale of new wealth _ "The Great Gatsby," but with China-size fortunes:
The son of one of China's richest men buys two Apple Watches, fastens them around his dog's forepaws and posts it on social media to wild public outcry.
A local official's son tries to use his father's name as a get-out-of-jail-free card after killing two students in a car crash.
Rumors of wild orgies in coastal cities periodically surface through Weibo, China's Twitter.
And in Los Angeles, where many rich Chinese families send their kids to school, an 18-year-old University of California, Irvine student from China was arrested in Malibu after leading police on a 122-mph chase across the city in a BMW 750i, unaware that he was being pursued.
The fuerdais' antics have inspired such national anxiety that last year the Chinese government ordered 70 of these second-generation nouveau riche to attend an education camp on Chinese values.
There's widespread concern in China that wealth is warping the social compass, said Xiaofei Li, a political science professor at York College of Pennsylvania. In the new China, morality is often measured by how much money someone makes, not how they make it.
"There's a saying in China: People will laugh at someone who is poor, but they will not laugh at a prostitute," Li said.
Rong, a second-year student at USC, rents an office in a downtown skyscraper, spends weekends in his family's 5,900-square-foot house in Newport Beach and, depending on his mood, drives a Bentley Continental GT, a Rolls-Royce Phantom, a Porsche Turbo Cayenne, a Cadillac, a Mercedes or a Range Rover _ a fleet he keeps parked around town, some in spaces that go for up to $2,400 a year at the downtown Los Angeles high-rise where he has his apartment.
He freely identifies as fuerdai, but with one caveat.
"It just defines you as someone's son. We want to be known for ourselves," Rong says.
