Jonathan Watts - When a Billion Chinese Jump

After the 1949 revolution, the imperialists were kicked out and the communists requisitioned the art deco buildings for party organs and government offices. The pendulum swung again in the 1990s, when the Shanghai Club became a showcase for the nation’s reform and opening-up policy. Now the Bund was once again a bridgehead for empires, this time in the form of domestic brokerages and shipping firms and foreign retailers and restaurant franchises.

Number 18 was the former China headquarters of Standard Chartered Bank. It had recently been transformed with Taiwanese money into one of Shanghai’s premier adult playhouses. Wandering in through the giant faux Greek columns, I was instantly submerged in marketing and wealth. At one end of the mezzanine level, a dazzling gold panel provided the backdrop for three grinning statues in the Standard Times series by the contemporary artist Gao Xiaowu, at the other a guitarist and cello player strummed live Muzak behind a balustrade. I felt out of place with a scruffy beard and no socks. But nobody seemed concerned about dress code. There were even fewer customers than at the Barbie emporium. I was as much of an audience as the Muzakians were likely to get at this time on a weekday.

On the ground floor, the former bank offices had become boutiques for Cartier, Zegna, Boucheron, Patek Philippe, and A. Lange & Söhne. Up above, the sixth-floor roof terrace had been lavishly fitted out as the nightclub Bar Rouge. In between were a French-run restaurant, a contemporary art gallery, and the China headquarters of international designer brands. This, I felt, was where a real-life Barbie would come shopping and clubbing.

My guide was Emily Zhang Huijia, who had been recommended by a mutual friend as a connoisseur of consumption. She was a friendly, intelligent young woman from a middle-class family. Her mother was a hospital accountant. Her father was a lighting engineer for the Shanghai Opera. Emily was the public relations manager for Number 18 on the Bund.

Over a 48-yuan Tsingtao beer (normal retail price 3 yuan), she told me she had been a fashionista since her teens, brought up on Vogue, Glamour, and OK! magazines. Since entering the luxury-brand industry, she had worked for Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent, and Chanel.

When Emily was a child, her dad bought her a yang wawa, a plastic Western doll with curly hair and big round eyes. She called it Fang Fang, dressed it in clothes knitted by her mum, fed it, bathed it, and played doctors and nurses with it.

Barbies were rare in China back then. Only one of her friends, the daughter of a rich real estate agent, could afford them. Each doll cost 99 yuan. That was a lot. “I didn’t see 100-yuan notes very often back then,” Zhang recalled.

From that age, she raced toward a Western standard of living along with the rest of Shanghai. In 1985, when she was three, her family got its first color television. In 1992, around the same time as the first Barbies went on sale in China, Emily’s family bought their first air conditioner. So did everyone in the neighborhood. Then the country. 14

The Zhangs had their first fixed phone line installed when Emily was six. By the time she was sixteen, they were connected to the Internet. Not for the first time, I was staggered by the speed of change and China’s ability to leapfrog ahead with new technology. My family in the UK had a telephone three generations before Emily’s, but her parents went online four years earlier than mine.

By 2006, the average person in Shanghai owned two mobile phones, 1.7 air conditioners, 1.7 color television sets, and more than one fridge and spent 14,761 yuan, about 70 percent higher than the rest of the country. 15Demand surged for everything from cement to wood products. Shanghai residents used almost twice as much toilet paper as the average in developed nations and had a bigger carbon footprint than people in the UK. 16The city was now consuming beyond the planet’s means, and its appetite was still growing by the day.

Rather than being seen as unsustainable, this was more usually described as “good for business.” The rest of China was trying to follow suit. It was a matter of economic logic and street fashion. Emily’s generation could afford more than the essentials; they could buy style.

“I’m from Shanghai. I’m a Shanghai girl. We don’t earn so much money, but we see luxury brands every day. After we see all that good stuff, we don’t want to buy anything else.”

Emily immersed herself in the luxury industry so she could buy at a hefty discount at stock-clearance and sample sales. Most of her friends were in the industry and they shared information about sales. The first time she went, she blew a third of her salary on Fendi sunglasses.

“It is like a fever. The price is so low that you cannot refuse. I used to go every month and buy a lot. It was like a disease.”

Like many a proud shopper, Emily listed how much she saved rather than how much she spent. She was wearing a half-price Dior watch reduced by 2,900 yuan and Chanel shoes knocked down from 7,000 yuan to 950. In her 40-square-meter flat near Fuxing Park, she also had dozens of other bags, accessories, and clothes, including an Armani coat for 999 yuan, discounted from 9,900. Compared with friends, she said she was restrained.

“I’ve developed the ability to control myself. The problem is, there is always a staff sale; and if you go, you buy.”

Her taste for big-name brands sometimes took her to Hong Kong, Bali, Thailand, the Philippines, and Europe, where she could avoid the high tariffs that were slapped on designer goods in China. Besides, shopping and traveling were fun and she could afford both.

In the previous three years, Emily’s monthly salary had increased from 3,000 yuan to just under 20,000, putting her firmly in the middle-class bracket. During moments of extreme stress, she would still gorge on a bucket of fried chicken from KFC, but usually she enjoyed haute cuisine and the high life. She ate at restaurants on weekends, had a French boyfriend, played poker every Thursday. Business and pleasure were mixed. Her favorite after-hours hangout, she said, was the building where she worked.

“Bund 18 has the coolest nightclub in Shanghai, so it is probably also the coolest in China.”

We agreed to meet there again at midnight, when she promised to introduce me to the city’s nightlife.

After dark, the illuminations on the Bund reminded me of London. There was the same weight of history in the spotlit neoclassical pillars and low-rise architecture. My British past offered no such comforting comparisons for the spectacular view on the other side of the Huangpu River, where the futuristic Pudong skyline rose higher into the sky than almost anywhere else on earth. The view managed to be both tacky and awe-inspiring at the same time. Highest among the cluster of spiking, sloping, curving towers was one of the world’s tallest buildings, the 492-meter-high bottle-opener-shaped Shanghai World Financial Center, and the red minaretlike dome of the Oriental Pearl Tower flanked by two tinny-looking replica globes. Twenty years earlier most of Pudong had been farmland. Today, it pulsated with light and color. There was no more stunning vista of modern China.

As soon as I stepped out of the taxi, I was approached by a migrant beggar and a drug dealer offering marijuana. Cars were pulling up and disgorging beautifully dressed couples, mostly expat Western men and their Chinese girlfriends. We shared an elevator near a stairwell decorated with discarded bicycles, a work by the artist Ai Weiwei. On the fourth floor, I met Emily in Lounge 18, decorated in “Haute Bohemian” style with walls of candles and faux opium dens. In the cigar lounge, she introduced me to the French food and beverage manager, Julian Desmettre. Over a mojito, he told me how the nouveaux riches from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore had made the city their playground: “Shanghai is like Paris during la Belle Epoque. This is the city of wealth and style, where people must show their money, where they are judged by how they dress, where they look down on those with less than themselves.”