China Today Series. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press; Hoboken, NJ: Wiley [distributor], 2014. xi, 207 pp. (Map.) US$22.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-7456-6971-7.
China’s sustained prosperity over the decades has considerably raised household income, and accordingly, improved the amounts, varieties and qualities of consumer goods. However, the World Bank reports that China’s household consumption expenditures only represent 35 percent of GDP in 2012, far below the world’s average of 60 percent. As China is engaged in transforming itself into a more consumption-based economy, LiAnne Yu’s new book Consumption in China: How China’s New Consumer Ideology is Shaping the Nation provides a timely guide to explore the consumerism in contemporary China.
The book aims to unveil “what is global and what is unique about China’s consumer revolution” (27). Yu collected the first-hand information including real-life cases and individual interviews in Beijing and Shanghai from 1990 to 2013 and connected her empirical observations with academic theories. Yu, who received a PhD in anthropology from UC San Diego, is an independent consultant specializing in consumer cultures in emerging markets. She has twenty-year experience in ethnographic research on behalf of global businesses seeking expertise on consumer habits.
The book covers three themes: the transformation of Chinese society, the influence of the one-child policy, and the activism against adverse consequences of consumption. The first theme discusses what modernization is bringing to China: public propaganda areas are giving way to malls and hypermarkets; consumers move seamlessly between virtual and real spaces with the aid of the Internet and digital devices; and social distinctions reemerge as people pursue social superiority through conspicuous consumption. In Chinese society, with keen interests in material possessions, relations with potential spouses and child rearing are increasingly commoditized, which fits in with Fan’s viewpoint that social status is the key in both male-female and intergenerational relationships (C. Simon Fan, Vanity Economics: An Economic Exploration of Sex, Marriage and Family, Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2014). The second theme addresses how the one-child policy is shaping China’s consumption landscape: while elder generations save every penny to give their kids the very best, young singletons focus on a lifestyle that is self-indulgent and self-fulfilling. The final theme is about how Chinese people express their consumption freedom, with topics spanning from a boycott of Japanese brands, media censorship, moral decay, and environmental degradation to the lack of food safety standards.
Yu’s work contributed to the literature by emphasizing the role of the “state” in Chinese consumerism. In the planned economy era, China’s centralized economic and trade policy led to surly services in state-owned stores, shoddy products and a scarcity of imported commodities. Despite its recent transformation into market economy, the state still employs a heavy hand in restricting foreign corporate access and Internet freedom. More importantly, China’s one-child policy, which has been implemented for over thirty years, has been shaping the consumption experiences of several generations.
One interesting aspect of this book is the identification of some consumption patterns with Chinese characteristics: for example, reusing branded shopping bags to carry lunches and phones, traveling abroad for shopping instead of sightseeing, and sitting in MacDonald’s for leisure time rather than eating fast food. Yu also argued that “consumers in China seek to display their hard work, entrepreneurialism, and potential for upward mobility” (82), which is against the idea of Thorstein Veblen (a 19th century American economist and sociologist) that being idle and wealthy is the most desirable status.
We also find a couple of limitations in this book. First, Yu seemed to attribute the prevailing consumerism to China’s political ideology while ignoring the contributions of market liberalization, technological advances, and cultural traditions. For example, Yu found that “China has overtaken the US to become the world’s largest market for luxury goods” (4) but did not probe deeply into the motivation of the massive purchases. In fact, many Chinese buy luxury goods for families and friends, instead of for themselves, probably because the Chinese culture values collectivism more than individualism.
Our other concern is regarding the author’s research methodology. Yu conducted research based on her personal conversations with upper-middle-class residents of Beijing and Shanghai, yet overlooked the huge population (over billions!) in the less rich cities and rural areas. Recording the lifestyles of the elites but not of the ordinary people makes the book’s title appear misleading. Besides, as Kiminori Matsuyama notes, the development of mass consumption societies follows the Flying Geese pattern: as productivity improves, each consumer good becomes affordable to a continually growing number of households (“The Rise of Mass Consumption Societies,” Journal of Political Economy 110[5], 2002: 1035–1070). It is therefore worth investigating the entire spectrum of the Chinese market.
Weaving the vivid human stories and representative voices into a theoretical framework, LiAnne Yu offers us a general understanding of consumerism in China’s cosmopolitan hubs from her perspective as an ethnographic professional. The book also gives a detailed portrait that depicts the universalities and particularities of China’s consumption practices through the eyes of a non-native. Overall, it is an easy-to-understand, up-to-date work which can be recommended to businesspeople who are exploring Chinese consumer behaviors and those who are new to, yet interested in China.
C. Simon Fan
Lingnan University, Hong Kong, China
Yu Pang
Macau University of Science and Technology, Macau, China
pp. 913-915