In the 1980s, the average Chinese found the money in their pockets growing and saw the emergence of a market for consumer products. Demand for the new 'Big Three’ (a refrigerator, a washing machine and a television set) replaced the practically provincial previous big three, namely a bicycle, a wristwatch and a sewing machine. As Chinese Premier Deng Xiaoping put it: to get rich is glorious (致富光荣 zhìfù guāngróng),
Three decades on, the 'communist' country's administration is simultaneously trying to rein in the culture of hyper-materialism, where girls declare they would "rather cry in the back of a BMW than smile on a bicycle," while trying tempt the Chinese people to stop saving and spend more.
China is currently trying to make the leap between a manufacturing economy to one led by domestic consumerism. By western standards, the mainland Chinese aren't big spenders, tending to keep a large proportion of funds stashed away. Figures suggest household consumption accounted for 35% of the Chinese economy in 2010, compared to 71% in the US.
But to those with the means (and some without) designer clothes, fast cars, foreign brands and luxurious holidays are the mark of fashionable modern China. And today's Big Three? Men have to own a car, a house and have a well paying job to even think of finding a wife.
One driver of consumerism in China is the birth of online shopping. Sites like Taobao, Jingdong, T-Mall, Alibaba have changed the face of Chinese retail. Go to a local market and you'll see how tactile and in-your-face Chinese shoppers can be: they touch everything, they inspect it, they insult it, they bargain over it. While some analysts said the Chinese would never take to online shopping because it doesn't allow them to see and feel what they are buying, the truth is cash is king.
Bargains galore have drawn millions of Chinese to splash their cash online, and e-commerce has other benefits, too. Many of China's disabled community have taken to running online stores for living as they can face stigma, restrictions and competition in the workplace. Changes are also spreading to China's remote rural villages, with Taobao recruiting "rural partners" to bring the internet age to the elderly and technologically disadvantaged. Given the growth China's e-commerce platforms have seen, it's incredible to realise there is still much room for growth in the provincial and agricultural areas. In 2010, 1.6 million people worked in e-commerce firms, ballooning to 2.5 million in June 2015. A further 18 million work in related businesses, such as postal services.
Such huge changes in shopping habits have concomitantly given online retail platforms the power to shape culture: the 11 November is known in China as Singles Day, which has become an online shopping frenzy to eclipse even Black Friday. This holiday was created as a joke less than 25 years ago in campuses in Nanjing because of the appearance of the date (11.11) looking like four solo stick figures and, after all, one is the loneliest number. Yet in 2015, this "joke" led to USD 14.3 billion in online sales thanks to yearly pushes and huge discounts since 2009 led by e-commerce sites such as Alibaba. In 2015, Alibaba drummed up shopping fever with a TV-extravaganza featuring international stars such as Kevin Spacey and Daniel Craig.
But what does 14.3 billion dollars look like? It's a sum that is difficult for humans to compute, but it is much easier to picture how e-commerce has crept into modern Chinese life. A collection by photographer Huang Qingjun shows families from across China posing next to everything they owned bought on Taobao, each photograph telling a tale of commodity, convenience and character.
In some ways, online shopping is more advanced in China's urban centres than it is in America and Europe. The innovation driving WeChat is blurring the boundaries of retail, social media and online messaging. If the drive of e-commerce and hyper-materialism shows no signs of slowing, what does this mean for China as a whole? Website Chinafile asks some pertinent questions of this pursuit of Stuff:
How much can Chinese consumers afford to spend given the nation’s lack of a social safety net? Moreover, how much consumption can China’s environment handle and is there a magic number that signals China’s people are consuming enough to keep the economy from tanking without simultaneously killing themselves with pollution?
(Images excluding Mao are from a collection called Totems by Alain Delorme to highlight consumerism in China)
