Jonathan Watts - When a Billion Chinese Jump

Chongqing was not just urbanizing, it was globalizing. Little more than a generation earlier, this had been a city where Red Guards in Mao tunics chanted anti-imperialist slogans. Today, young people with money dressed much like their counterparts in Birmingham, Chicago, or Nagoya. If anything, their values were even more materialistic and consumption-oriented.

After dinner, Spider-Man’s boss, He Qing, took me to Falling, which he described as the hottest nightspot in Chongqing. It was Wednesday night, but the dance floor was packed with beautiful people moving to techno music and playing dice. Our table had an 800 yuan ($114) minimum charge, which covered a bottle of vodka, a few imported beers, and a plate of elegantly carved fruit.

He Qing introduced me to some of Chongqing’s new rich, including the founder of a candy factory, a restaurant owner, and a bank employee. Without exception they were in their twenties, foreign-educated, and well connected—either through family or political ties—with the city’s movers and shakers. “No businessman can thrive unless they have contacts in the Communist Party and the underworld,” I was told.

I felt uneasy spending more on a night’s entertainment than bangbang man Yu earned from a month’s grueling work. I was not the only one conscious of the gap. He Qing told me his plan for the future: “Inequality and environmental destruction are the two biggest problems facing China.” He wanted to establish a new wind-energy company that would employ migrants to build a cleaner city, using German technology.

I felt sure he would make a killing. Chongqing was growing richer, more densely populated, and more environmentally stressed. 27The city government said it would pioneer green urbanization. The city ought to look cleaner and brighter as its population prospers. If the urban middle class followed the trend of the West, they might start to eat more eco-friendly vegetarian food and drive smaller cars. Perhaps. More usually, though, cities tend to distance people from the environment and nurture an unsustainable lifestyle. Metropolises are giant blocks of consumption. Their buildings are fitted with air conditioners and modern conveniences that create an artificial climate. Vertical living represents a shift in consciousness from the horizontal, seasonal life of the farmer to a linear drive for progress. Urban residents laugh at farmers, whose lives go around in circles, never getting anywhere, simply following the seasons. City dwellers, on the other hand, pursue career tracks, expect their lives to be endlessly onward and upward. They tend to measure success by how much they can consume. In the future, as resources grow scarcer, more are likely to be left unfulfilled.

There are signs too that people might be turning their backs on the cities. In Guangdong, which was the first to attract an influx of rural laborers to its factories, companies have begun to complain about worker shortages. Some economists believe China is approaching the Lewis turning point, at which demand for labor outstrips supply. 28The lure of the city had its limits.

Outside at midnight, the bright lights could not mask a seedier side of city life. Many migrant women worked as prostitutes in karaoke bars or massage parlors. Their children were left with relatives or sent to the streets to beg, sell flowers, or sing for money until the early hours. At a night market, a queue of hawkers offered to clean my shoes, sell me cigarettes, or pour me soup from a flask. A seven-year-old girl plucked at my arm and coyly entreated me to buy a rose from her. “Where is your mother?” I asked. “Oh, she’s at work,” she replied.

A desperate-looking girl came over, carrying a menu of songs and a battered, badly tuned guitar. She said she was sixteen but looked more like twelve. She told me she had been in Chongqing only a few months and had already decided she did not like it. I paid 3 yuan (44 cents) and picked the song “Pengyou” (Friend). The young busker stared at some faraway point as she strummed the one chord she knew and sang out of tune. It was miserably sad.

Farther along the street, a bangbang man wandered into the distance carrying his bamboo pole. I wondered if he was about to finish work or start it.

The resident of Number 550 Huaihai Road in Shanghai was a rather unusual migrant. Born in Wisconsin on March 9, 1959, Barbara Millicent Roberts was the world’s most famous supermodel. She drove a Corvette convertible, owned a dream home with a pool, partied with jocks, and adored shopping. In the U.S., she had been a prom queen and a role model. In China, she was emerging as an ambassador for consumer culture.

Better known as Barbie, this 30-centimeter-tall icon had spawned a billion plastic clones and encouraged generations of women across the world to pursue the 1950s American dream. Fashion was her passion. Her looks were her life. The world’s best plastic surgeons had sculpted her features, given her a gravity-defying bust, and ensured that she would never grow old. Giorgio Armani, Versace, and Christian Lacroix had personally designed her wardrobe, but her consumer addiction was impossible to satisfy. Even as she accumulated accessories, furniture, and cars, the world’s most famous shopaholic repeated the same question in the same tinny tones year after year: “Will we ever have enough clothes?”

Barbie was first sold in China in the early 1990s. But it was not until 2009 that she was given her own home in the retail heartland of Shanghai. In a blaze of pink and blond, Mattel, the world’s biggest toy company, marked its leading cash cow’s fiftieth birthday by opening the planet’s largest Barbie emporium. Covered in pink plastic, the six-story doll’s house on Huaihai Road, in the heart of the city’s shopping district, became an instant landmark. At the launch party, kung fu star Jet Li and the actress Christy Chung were among the celebrities quaffing champagne and cocktails on a spiral staircase bedecked with plastic blondes.

This was more than a party; it was the launch of a marketing campaign aimed at prolonging and expanding the plastic lifestyle championed by the toy firm. For the Barbie market to continue growing for another fifty years, the doll would have to make it big in China.

I lunched at Barbie’s place at the start of what became a social climb up Shanghai’s consumer hierarchy. The top floor of the doll’s house was a fantastically kitschy themed restaurant with a menu designed by the chef David Laris. It offered Barbie™ Burgers for 60 yuan with Barbie™ pink sauce, Ken’s burgers, Pinktastic Pasta, Doll-icious Desserts, and Barbie™ Tini cocktails. The restaurant did not seem to be hugely popular, which might explain the generous promotion offer. Diners who opted for the special meal received a boxed set of Barbie plates and cutlery that they could take home.

I wasn’t one of them. But after polishing off a Barbie™ Burger, I chatted to a customer who was delighted at her takeaway tea set. Liu Yunting was an advertising company employee who had come with a friend to mooch around the doll’s shop and in-house spa. They could not afford Barbie dolls as kids, but now they could eat, drink, and soak up the Barbie atmosphere. I asked Liu what she planned to do with her new tableware.

“I will use it myself.”

“Isn’t it a little childish?”

“Not at all. It is cute. This is much better than the stuff for children. We know better how to appreciate it.”

Liu was a member of the fastest-growing consumer class: single women—or xiaobailing (white-collar princesses). 2Just like the “office ladies” of Japan, they had high levels of disposable income and a craving for designer labels. Marketing moguls were obsessed by this group. They were the future face of consumer power. State planners forecast that half the population would be middle class by 2020. 3As this upwardly mobile group was growing, consuming more, and traveling farther, they were getting ever closer to the unsustainable, energy-intensive Barbie lifestyle.