Consuming China

Approaches to Cultural Change in Contemporary China

Kevin Latham, Stuart Thompson, Jakob Klein, Kevin Latham, Stuart Thompson, Jakob Klein

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415546867
• eBook ISBN: 9781135791438
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Post-Mao China has been characterized in literature and the media as a burgeoning consumer society. Consuming China investigates this characterization by examining the cultural significance of consumption and consumerism in the People's Republic of China today. In questioning the notion of consumption, this impressive work suggests that it is not simply a symptom of economic reform within China neither a product of the emergence and transformation of contemporary Chinese capitalism. Rather, the essays offer a new perspective on Chinese consumption by focusing on more than just consumerism, looking at the practices of consumption in relation to different manifestations of social and cultural change.

Drawing on case studies from Taiwan, Hong Kong and the People's Republic of China, Consuming China affords a greater understanding of the practice of Chinese consumption and will appeal to China scholars and anthropologists, and to those with an interest in cultural and gender studies.

1	Introduction
	Consumption and cultural change in contemporary China
	Kevin Latham

Introduction

In the period of reform since the death of Chairman Mao and the fall of the Gang of Four, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has been consumed by the practices and rhetorics of consumption. On the one hand, from the early 1980s on, market reforms gave a new place in Chinese society to practices of consumption, with far-reaching social consequences (Link et al. 1989, 2002; Davis and Vogel 1990; Davis and Harrell 1993; Li 1998; Davis 2000; Huot 2000). Starting in the countryside with the introduction of the household responsibility system, Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms enabled Chinese families to accumulate new wealth and develop a new spending power not seen for decades. Between 1978 and 1985 alone, both rural income and rural consumption more than doubled. Urban income and consumption increased more slowly through the 1980s (61 per cent and 47 per cent respectively for the same period) but soared in the 1990s as rural rises slowed (Chao and Myers 1998: 353–4). The asceticism of revolution was replaced by the economic driving force of consumerism. Throughout the 1980s the Chinese population strived to buy the ‘four goods’: colour television sets, stereo cassette players, washing machines, and fridges. In the 1990s these were supplemented by motorbikes, cars, karaoke video-disc players, pagers, faxes and much more. In the first five years of the 1990s alone, the number of mobile phones in China grew from 20,000 to 3.4 million (Erwin 2000) and by early 2005 there were more than 350 million mobile subscribers (MII 2005).

At the same time as this massive growth in consumer spending on household, entertainment and electronic goods, there were accompanying increases in expenditure on food and leisure activities (Chao and Myers 1998; Davis 2000: 3–12) and people saw their leisure time transformed in the reform period (Wang 1995). Under Mao, time not spent working was generally taken up with household chores, political meetings and collective activities organized by the work unit. In the reform period, by contrast, domestic appliances such as washing machines and fridges reduced the time spent on housework, even if they simultaneously reinforced patriarchal attitudes (Robinson 1985), while political meetings became far fewer and more relaxed. Television provided entertainment without the need to leave home, and there was an explosion of opportunities for individual or family, rather than collective, leisure activities such as cinema or theatre-going, snooker, dancing, restaurant dining, bowling or other sports.

By the early 2000s, at least in urban areas, consumerism and its trappings had become regular features of everyday life, whether through consumer practices or media imagery. Consumerism has also contributed to the spatial transformation of Chinese cities, self-perceptions and social interactions in ways similar to what Lui has called the ‘malling’ of Hong Kong in the 1960s and 1970s (Lui 2001). Some of China’s historic cities have relaunched themselves as the playgrounds of China’s super-rich. Hangzhou, for instance, partly exploiting the historic resonances of its time as an Imperial capital and centre of affluence, has seen its famous West Lake revitalized as a relatively tranquil retreat for eastern China’s multi-millionaires, with villas selling at 50,000 yuan per square metre and shopping malls filled with names like Armani, Dolce & Gabbana, Zegna, Louis Vuitton, Rolex and Dior (O’Neill 2005a). Indeed, international luxury goods makers have started to see China as a major market for conspicuous consumption, with an estimated 4.5 million Chinese having annual disposable income in excess of US$30,000 in 2005 (O’Neil 2005b).

These consumer practices, ranging from domestic spending to conspicuous consumption, constitute the tangible features of what has been characteristically described by scholars and journalists as China’s ‘consumer revolution’ (see e.g. Davis 2000; Wu 1999; Li 1998; Chao and Myers 1998). Scholars and observers of China have also gorged themselves on the greater openness and access to China that has been brought by the reform period, and on the massive social, cultural, political and economic changes that it has entailed. Just as the Party, intellectuals and others in China were finding new ways to indulge in ‘fevers’, whether in contradistinction to the new consumerism, as with the intellectuals’ ‘Cultural Fever’ (Zhang 1997; Wang 1996: 38, 48–56) or intricately embroiled with it as with ‘Mao fever’, ‘Hula Hoop fever’, or even patriotic fevers (Barme 1999: 8; Dirlik 1996: 194–5), so, too, scholars of China throughout the world have participated in what we might call a ‘consumption fever’, for the social and cultural changes of the reform era have been almost unknowable outside the frames of reference of markets and consumption. We need only think of how the post-Mao period is generally characterized as the ‘reform’ period. Given that the reforms in question are on the whole ‘market reforms’, such characterization clearly forefronts the economic aspects of social change in the country.

However, the focus of this volume is different to other recent volumes that have given important and insightful overviews and examples of recent consumer practices in mainland China (e.g. Davis 2000; Link et al. 2002). It differs in two fundamental ways. First, the focus is on practices of consumption, understood more broadly than consumerism, and their relation to different manifestations of social and cultural change. This includes the ways in which practices of consumption contribute to broader Chinese social and cultural changes, and also the ways in which various different kinds of changes are culturally understood in and through practices of consumption. Hence, Palmer (Chapter 4), Latham (Chapter 5) and Klein (Chapter 6) chart the appearance of ‘the consumer’ as a social actor and legal entity in China, while Tapp (Chapter 11) investigates the way that technological changes have transformed the consumption of ethnicity and Thompson (Chapter 7) considers the relationship between food consumption, death rituals and the transition from parent to ancestor.

Second, the focus of this volume is not restricted to mainland China and includes chapters on consumption in Taiwan (Stafford’s Chapter 3), Hong Kong (Robinson’s Chapter 10), and a transnational virtual context (Tapp’s Chapter 11). In the light of recent work undermining unitary notions of Chineseness (e.g. Sun 2002; Chow 2000; Dirlik and Zhang 1997), the juxtaposition of different Chinese contexts is not intended to postulate broader underlying ‘cultural Chineseness’ of the kind often seen in the past (see, e.g., Johnson et al. 1985; Link et al. 1989; Sangren 1987). Rather, it offers a number of alternative starting points for the pursuit and understanding of both similarities or continuities as well as disjunctures and differences between Chinese practices of consumption. The emphasis in this volume is on cultural perspectives on Chinese consumption, broadly understood, and the identification of different kinds of change that can be viewed through the prism of consumption in Chinese contexts.

Several chapters in this volume do deal with consumption in post-Mao mainland China, but they also carry with them this underlying interest in social and cultural change. This is broadly pursued in one of two ways. One is through historical reflection over several decades. So, for instance, Croll (Chapter 2) offers an anthropological reflection on the cultural changes accompanying China’s consumer revolution in the 1980s and 1990s, while Evans (Chapter 9) shows the importance of considering how forms of consumption in the reform period may be informed by practices dating back to the Mao period. The other way that cultural change is dealt with is by focusing on different key moments of change or transition. I have argued elsewhere (Latham 2002) that, although China’s reform period has been dominated by ‘rhetorics of transition’, there is none the less a great deal of ambiguity as to what kind of transition is taking place. Different people may have quite different formulations of what China’s transition is either from or to. Seen in this light, several chapters in this volume can be seen as detailing specific moments of transition that have helped make up the kaleidoscopic picture of China’s changing social landscape. Bayne (Chapter 8), for instance, in a specifically historically situated paper, traces the emergence of practices of photography in early-1990s Hangzhou. Latham plots the emergence of the imagined consumer as a driving force in Chinese media production at a time when the newspaper group where he conducted research was launching a new, commercially-driven expansion strategy. Klein, meanwhile, identifies a series of changes in the mediated consumption of food in Guangzhou accompanying the transformation of the city’s restaurant scene by the arrival of ethnic and regional cuisines.

However, the idea of moments of transition can be extended to several of the other chapters in the volume dealing with other non-mainland contexts. Robinson, for instance, deals with the relation between mediated consumption in and of the films of Wong Kar-wai, against the backdrop of Hong Kong’s 1997 handover and changes in global modernity more generally. Meanwhile, Tapp plots the transition of Hmong identity with the arrival of the internet, and Thompson considers the complex interrelationship between ritual, myth and consumption in the physical and symbolic transformations accompanying death. In all of these examples we find an underlying theme of cultural change related to consumption.

Characterizing Chinese consumption

This volume emerged from responses to a fairly straightforward-looking, but deliberately problematic question: what, if anything, is distinctive about or particularly characteristic of Chinese consumption? Considering the amount of scholarly attention devoted to China in the era of market reforms, and the commonplace observations of the consumerism, materialism and commodification that now characterize everyday life throughout Greater China, this is a surprisingly little-asked question. Indeed, consumption and consumerism have on the whole been taken for granted as already known and unproblematic categories of social behaviour, which do not require further elaboration.¹

This question was one of the main starting points of a series of seminars organized and chaired by Stuart Thompson and Kevin Latham for the London China Seminar held at London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) between October 1998 and June 1999, and earlier versions of several chapters in this volume were given at that time. The seminar set out to investigate the question of the ‘Chineseness’ of consumption in China and the issues that it raises. However, though the question may initially appear straightforward, contemporary China’s economic, political and social contexts reveal a diverse range of complexities and contradictions, which make the answers to it complex.²

Since the publication of Galbraith’s The Affluent Society in 1958 there has been a growing interest in consumption and consumerism in the social sciences, and there have been numerous calls to reappraise our understandings of contemporary society forefronting consumption rather than production which had previously occupied centre stage (see, e.g., Miller 1987, 1995; Parkin 1993; Appadurai 1986; Campbell 1987; Featherstone 1991; Douglas and Isherwood 1979; Bourdieu 1984; du Gay 1996).³ Such theories also often link consumption to globalization and post-modernity. Several of the chapters in this volume also therefore consider the usefulness of these theories in Chinese contexts (e.g. those by Robinson, Bayne, Evans, Tapp). However, such theories of consumption have been worked out almost entirely in terms of European, American and other ‘Western’ experiences and, on the whole, in ways that assume a homogeneity to those experiences. There is a danger here of falling into the traps of exoticization through the use of the ‘ethnic qualifier’ (Chow 2000, 2004), contrasting ‘Chinese consumption’ with ‘Western’ consumption or consumption in general. However, this volume should be seen as an attempt not to instantiate essentialism but to problematize it, while simultaneously resisting the opposing tendency to homogenize through generalization or Eurocentrism. In this vein, the chapters refer to and apply Western theories of consumption in a range of different ways – some appreciative and some critical – without attempting to set up rigid delineations of what is ‘Chinese’ and what is ‘Western’. At the same time we find several chapters in this volume identifying alternative issues that arise given quite different Chinese cultural, economic, political and historical contexts.

We might consider, for instance, how Chinese consumption may, in part at least, itself constitute a quite different kind of economy to those elsewhere. Hence, Charles Stafford argues that one cannot properly understand the development of so-called free markets in China without considering their imbrication in pre-existing but shifting relations of exchange. This is what he calls the Chinese ‘ritual economy’, which ‘may be said to encompass not only traditional patterns of gift-giving during festivals and ritual occasions, but also the reciprocal provision of financial and practical support within networks of kin and friends, and . . . as a kind of “tribute” to the powerful’. Although analysts may be tempted to separate such a realm of cultural practices from conventionally conceived economic activity, Stafford argues that such a separation is problematic. It is not simply that there are particular culturally defined ways in which Chinese people come to conceive of their economic affairs, but rather that this ritual economy, in many instances, is precisely the economic activity about which they are thinking. At the same time, he argues that the emergence of free markets in China has to be understood in terms of a moral negotiation about changing relationships of exchange (cf. also Li 1998: 13–14).

Over the last decade, the academic study of what Stafford refers to as the ritual economy has been centred around the related activities of gift exchange and the cultivation of personal networks, or the ‘art of guanxi’ (e.g. Yang 1994; Yan 1998)...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents 
• List of figures
• Notes on the contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction: Consumption and Cultural Change in Contemporary China: Kevin Latham
• 2. Conjuring Goods, Identities and Cultures: Elisabeth J. Croll
• 3. Deception, Corruption and the Chinese Ritual Economy: Charles Stafford
• 4. The Emergence of Consumer Rights: Legal Protection of the Consumer in the PRC: Michael Palmer
• 5. Powers of Imagination: The Role of the Consumer in China’s Silent Media Revolution: Kevin Lath
• 6. Changing Tastes in Guangzhou: Restaurant Writings in the Late 1990s: Jakob Klein
• 7. On (not) Eating the Dead: A Reader’s Digest of a ‘Chinese’ Funerary Taboo: Stuart Thompson
• 8. Images of the Chinese: Photography and Consumerism in 1990s Hangzhou: John Bayne
• 9. Fashions and Feminine Consumption: Harriet Evans
• 10. Wong Kar-wai’s Sensuous Histories: Luke Robinson
• 11. The Consuming or the Consumed? Virtual Hmong in China: Nicholas Tapp
• 12. Afterword: Reflections upon China, Consumption and Cultural Change: Kevin Latham
• Index