Jonathan Watts - When a Billion Chinese Jump

Sometimes described as a Chinese Oprah Winfrey, she had become the highest-profile socialite in Shanghai. The week before we met, she hosted Quincy Jones, Ewan McGregor, and Halle Berry at a film festival. As well as dropping celebrity names, she put a lot of effort into building up her own. Entering her expansive apartment, I saw a showroom for the House of Yue-Sai brand. While I waited for the great woman, I leaned back on Yue-Sai cushions and the maid brought tea in Yue-Sai cups on Yue-Sai trays.

Given the display of self-love all around me, I unwisely started by describing the previous night’s Jaguar party without realizing that Yue-Sai had been not only present but the main attraction. I hadn’t been paying attention. So much for my social-climbing skills. She was not amused.

“I was there. I was the first awardee.” Her voice rose. She looked genuinely hurt.

We had not got off to a good start. I would have been better off shouting insults at Yue-Sai than failing to pay attention. It was not the last time in our interview that my faux pas was mentioned. I came to think of it in mental capitals as the shock.

Her reaction was understandable. Yue-Sai was in the vanity business. She had made a living out of being the center of attention. This was more than superficial. Yue-Sai claimed to have created consumer culture in China.

“I was the first one to tell them, ‘Go ahead and buy something to make yourself feel good.’ It was the early nineties. Nobody wanted to flaunt wealth back then. Nobody had wealth back then. I would sell lipstick for five dollars and sisters would pool their money to buy one. It was the start of consumerism.”

Engagingly, charmingly, Yue-Sai told me how she was driven by idealism, how she “colorized” the gray China of the 1980s.

During the Cultural Revolution, cosmetics were condemned as a sign of counterrevolutionary bourgeois habits. The hangover lasted a decade until Yue-Sai began selling lipstick, mascara, and eyeliner. But this was no street-fashion revolution. The order for China to make up its face came from the top. It was a deliberate ploy to distract attention from politics in the aftermath of the bloody crackdown that followed the Tiananmen protests of 1989. Foreign firms pulled out of China en masse. The politburo wanted to show that the country could continue on the path to modernity. They called on Yue-Sai to help.

“At a private dinner with the vice premier, he asked if I would be willing to start a company while everyone else was withdrawing. He told me it would be wonderful and it would look good,” she recalled.

“Did you have any doubts?” I asked.

“None. I never doubted that China would open up. The fact that they had invited me to do a TV series and lead them into the world showed that.”

“Even after the crackdown in 1989?”

“No doubts. Some even say that my program started the Tiananmen demonstrations because I showed the Chinese people the world.” 23

The political turmoil worked out well for Yue-Sai, who was able to start her business on a field abandoned by many foreign retailers. Like countless firms since, she opened her first stores in Shanghai, before tackling the politically riskier ground of Beijing. In advance of setting up shops in the capital she sought the support of the powerful Women’s Federation. The wife of Li Peng, the prime minister who ordered the troops to fire on the protesters, organized a lunch of all the vice premiers’ wives to back her.

It was to prove an initiation into a rich elite that she has since helped to expand. Yue-Sai’s products were a massive hit. Cosmetics proved a gold mine, particularly in Shanghai, where women spend fifty times the national average on makeup. 24By the time she sold the company to L’Oréal in 2004, its annual revenue was $80 million. The multinational then made even more money by adding strong skin-whitening agents to their products. 25

Along with a surge in popularity of cosmetic surgery to enlarge breasts, lengthen legs, and make eyes look more Western, the growth of the skin-whitening industry suggested China was moving closer to the Barbie ideal. 26Even Yue-Sai, the ambassador of consumer culture, was starting to lament that the world “was becoming all the same.” More than ten years after introducing Western cosmetics, she launched a line of dark-haired, brown-eyed Chinese-style dolls.

“I like Barbie, but I thought it was necessary to have a different doll. The idea behind it is to tell Chinese kids that you are beautiful too. The standard of beauty is not just blue eyes and blond hair. It was a revolutionary idea.” 27

Unfortunately, it was also a failure. In toy shops, the doll—inevitably named Yue-Sai Wawa—proved the poor cousin of Barbie, suffering second-class display status if it made it to the shelves at all.

The same proved true of House of Yue-Sai products, which were sold only online. Faced with more market competition and less Communist Party backing, the former cosmetics maven was struggling. She partly blames declining moral standards: “The whole environment has changed because so much wealth has been made by so many people. In all nouveau riche societies, people flaunt their money. Here too. They don’t buy a bottle of wine, they buy a case. But all they really know is brand names. It takes a long time to acquire genuine style.”

That train of thought took her back to her own credentials and then the shock that someone, i.e., me, might have overlooked them. “I can’t believe you missed me last night.”

In an attempt to switch attention, I asked if she would buy a Jaguar after headlining the company’s promotion event.

The Yue-Sai cut shook from side to side. “They only offered a ten percent discount. I don’t buy for ten percent.”

It was not just this doyenne of consumer culture who was occasionally hesitant about splurging. If there was a glimmer of environmental hope in Shanghai, it was that, even here, shoppers had not yet fully embraced Western levels of consumption. Many still preferred flasks of hot tea to cans of Coke. In the big supermarkets, the average basket of goods was smaller than in the West and profit margins were lower. This thrift was not inspired by environmental concerns but by a traditional desire to live within one’s means. But that prudence was changing.

I asked Yue-Sai if she regretted her role in promoting an American consumer lifestyle in China, given what has since been learned about the fragility of the environment and the limits of the world’s resources.

The question prompted the first silence of our two-hour interview, and then just a hint of self-doubt about her influence on Chinese consumers: “I don’t want them to live like in the U.S., but I want them to have a more beautiful life. Of course, I am worried about the environment. Everyone is worried about that, but …” Another long silence.

“I can’t answer your question well. If you ask me what I am concerned about it is not resources, it is how substandard things are. With the new consumerism, everyone is trying so hard to be corrupt, to make more money. Everyone is squeezing down.”

I tried the question again, more directly.

“Do you ever wish you hadn’t helped to launch consumer culture in China?”

“No, the government wanted it. China had to open up to the world. If the government didn’t want to do it, it would never have happened. When I started working in China in the early 1980s, the leadership was great. They were visionary—”

“But they weren’t aware then of the environmental consequences as we are now,” I interjected.

“No, they weren’t … I just read an article about the Antarctic crumbling.”

“Do you think it would help to move away from a consumer lifestyle?”