Empire of Things

by Frank Trentmann

  Notwithstanding public policy, bridewealth has been on the rise in the last two generations. Traditionally, it fulfilled the obligations of a groom’s family to the bride’s kin. Now it increasingly serves private wants – a TV, furniture or, more lately, a washing machine and a car, things that a couple wanted to start out life together. Young people were pressing their parents for more pocket money and, if they did not get enough, resorted to petty theft to obtain what they felt ought to be theirs. The sense of individualism was reflected in the home. By the 1970s, new homes were built to offer some private space on the top floor. Bedrooms became separated from the living room. A decade later, children gained their own room. Families started to watch their preferred programmes in separate rooms on separate TV sets. Life was about ‘being able to do what you want’ (xiang gansha jiu gansha), as villagers put it.35

  The search for contrasts between ‘East’ and ‘West’ naturally leads to the discovery of unique characteristics. But there are intriguing parallels between them as well as differences. One shared pattern has been the asymmetrical take-up of consumer technologies. In 1960s Japan, families bought a TV but made do without their own flush toilet. This was not miles away from the story in many poor homes in British cities in the 1950s, nor so different from Americans’ preference for soft furniture and crystal glasses over sanitation and insulation in the late eighteenth century that we encountered earlier.36 Indian homes today enjoy many domestic comforts while their cities lack constant water and a sewage system.37 But so did many French cities a century ago. For rural Europeans in the 1950s and ’60s, viewing television in a crowd in a country bar was equally the first step on the road to a private set, although Italians preferred game shows with big prizes to big men in loincloths. Again, that many cosmetic items sold once they were marketed in little sachets does not reflect some peculiarly Indian trait.38 Chocolates and other small luxuries were sold in similarly small packets in the first vending machines in early-twentieth-century Europe. These are characteristics of many emerging mass markets where the poor are enjoying rising but limited discretionary spending.

  It would be equally misleading, however, to conclude that parallels demonstrate convergence. Retailing remains hugely diverse. European chains have had mixed success in Asia and had to adapt to high local expectations of customer service. In 2010, the French supermarket chain Carrefour opened a store in Haikou with a sales area of 6,000 square metres and thirty cashiers. Fourteen years later, it had 236 hypermarkets in the ‘middle kingdom’, but this is in a country with 1.3 billion customers. Imagine a dozen of these stores in the whole of France – hardly a sign of dominance.39 Shopping habits continue to diverge. A Chinese person will spend nine hours a week shopping here and there, talking to neighbours and family members along the way; an American picks up all the groceries in a single pit stop. A tiny 10 per cent of China’s beer market is in foreign hands. Local retailers have stepped up their game. In India, the number of small traditional family stalls has increased since the reform period. In Delhi, thousands flock to Globus, Lifestyle and other glitzy malls in Gurgaon on the weekend, while millions still get what they need from small shops such as the Fancy Boot House, Self Choice – the Flavour of Fashion, Kadrix & Sons Jewellers, the sexologist (Gold medallist), and the countless other food stalls, pan sellers and electronic and household goods stores in Sangam Vihar and other local markets that continue for miles off major thoroughfares like M. B. Road (see Plate 49). In 2012, the government lowered investment barriers to attract foreign chains. So far, not many have set up shop.

  Consumption has evolved into distinct national types in Asia. One major difference between the early phase of mass consumption in Japan (1955–73) and that in China since 1979 was that Japan managed growth with equality while China has become one of the most unequal societies on the planet. In Singapore, the state engineered equality by making everyone a home owner, channelling rising incomes into property through a system of compulsory saving funds that could be withdrawn only to buy a house. Here again consumption was shaped by the state.

  Japan’s economic crisis in 1989–90 set off a new split between savers and spenders. In the ‘lost decade’ of the 1990s, equality gave way to kakusa shakai, a society of disparities. To boost demand, Japan and Korea switched from promoting saving to flaunting credit. Credit-card spending ballooned; savings plummeted. By 2000, a quarter of all purchases were paid for with plastic in Japan. Korea even offered a tax rebate on purchases made by credit card. In Korea, household debt as a share of GDP came to rival that in the USA. Thousands of Japanese committed suicide because of indebtedness. By 2003, the household saving rate in Japan had dropped to 6 per cent, in Korea to 3 per cent, well below the respectable 11 per cent of France, Germany and Italy.40 So much for the caricature that Asians save and Westerners spend. Meanwhile, fast-growing India and China just kept saving.

  The Asian crisis of 1989 left behind a curious paradox. It was the countries hardest hit that were forced to be more consumer friendly. In addition to easier credit, Japan pursued ‘price destruction’ (kakaku hakkai) by slashing the cost of food and breaking the hold of small retailers. Discounters opened their doors; shopping hours became more convenient. Just as they were tightening their belts, Japanese consumers came to enjoy unprecedented choice and cheapness.41 In booming China, by contrast, consumption became less important. While the cake has been getting bigger, the slice reaching the people has been getting smaller. Yes, consumption doubled in the 1990s, but saving tripled, to an official 23 per cent. The engine pulling the Chinese economy is investment, not consumption – in contrast to India, where household savings are equally high but investment is low. Naturally, 1.3 billion people buy a lot, but in 2005 the average Chinese still spent less than the average Albanian or Sudanese.42 Personal loans remain a tiny fraction of bank lending when compared to other emerging nations. A Brazilian, for example, carries four times as much consumer debt. We could continue with facts and figures, but the point has been made. There are probably few people further removed today from the popular image of the spendthrift consumer than the Chinese.

  The reason is simple, and leads us back to the centrality of the state. When the Communist party began to cut the state workforce and slash welfare services after 1997, it shifted the burden to private households. Health, education and housing – once free – now cost money and worry. A growing chunk of ‘private consumption’ is absorbed by these three. It is not uncommon for a businessman to spend a quarter of his earnings on the education of his children.43 On top, young couples face the so-called 4–2–1 phenomenon, with four parents to look after and only one child of their own to help them in the future. It encourages saving. Relatively speaking, buying stuff here and now is less important than planning for the future.

  In 2004, China’s Premier Wen Jiabo announced that domestic demand had to become the basis of China’s development. This has been easier said than done, and until wages, public health and education receive a major boost it is difficult to see how it will happen; health insurance (since 2007) has so far been rudimentary. As we shall see in Part Two, private affluence in the West since the 1950s was helped by ‘public consumption’, with increased state spending on housing, welfare and leisure. How China will accomplish the former without the latter is unclear. Today, the Middle Kingdom remains as far removed from the kind of consumer society exemplified by the United States as from Europe and Japan. In the course of the last decade, the contribution of consumption (what households spend on goods and services) to GDP has fallen from 42 per cent to below 35 per cent, although official statistics downplay the extra spending on the home.44 In the USA, it is double that. The rest of Asia stands around 50 per cent, pretty normal by the standards of other developed countries. The Chinese are simply not consumerist, if ‘consumerism’ is defined as a culture of instant gratification where private spending drives the economy and dominates everyday life.

  TRADITIONAL MODERN

  These aggr
egate developments give an impression of the changing terrain of consumption. They do not tell us how Asians experienced it. In the final analysis, consumption is about practices and identities, about doing and belonging. Having a few more yen, yuan or rupees to spend is one thing. How greater spending affects lifestyle and belonging is something else. What does it feel like being a Japanese, Chinese or Indian consumer? Have older customs, hierarchies and mentalities been swapped for a more anonymous, global consumer culture where status and identity are set by one’s taste and possessions?

  Across contemporary Asia, the single most talked about group has been the middle class. For national governments and foreign investors alike, the middle class has been the litmus test of success: the bigger that group, the more modern one’s society. In reality, the middle class has proved difficult to pin down. Measurements have varied hugely, depending on whether ‘the middle’ has been defined as the statistical average, in terms of their possessions, as anyone between the starving poor and the super rich, or as a combined effect of education, income and lifestyle. In India in the 1990s, estimates ranged from 100 to 500 million people. In a 2000 survey by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, almost half the respondents placed themselves in the middle, even though only 3 per cent had the goods and income required to meet the official definition.45

  Such confusion is not peculiarly Asian or new. The middle class in Brazil is equally elusive. Into the nineteenth century, Europeans used a range of competing categories such as rank, sort, degree and order. The British ‘middling sort’ found its voice as the ‘middle class’ only in the course of the struggle over the vote, when it presented itself as the embodiment of constitutional balance and social stability. What is new in Asia since the 1980s is how talk of a new middle class has mainly emanated from governments and corporations, not from a political movement. In China, the very term remains tainted by association with Maoist attacks on the bourgeoisie. Officials prefer to speak more narrowly of a ‘middle income group’ or ‘newly propertied middle strata’ (xinzhongchan jieceng). These are economic categories that lack the sense of a shared identity and lifestyle discernible in nineteenth-century Europe. In 1900 Paris, members of the bourgeoisie enjoyed the same culture of consumption, with similar tastes in possessions and in leisure pursuits such as collecting, painting and theatre-going. In 2000 Shanghai, by contrast, researchers found that professionals with almost identical income, education and occupation led vastly different lifestyles.46

  In a country where power resides in the Communist Party, status is achieved through proximity to that Party, which secures access to land and assets; not through conspicuous consumption. Sociologically as much as economically, then, China is not a consumer society in the classic sense. Everyone has more or less the same stuff. Dramatic inequalities are obscured by the fact that rich and poor alike have TVs.47 For centuries, over-consumption has been blamed on social emulation and ‘keeping up with the Joneses’. Contemporary China ticks according to a different mechanism. It is a highly unequal society, where, ironically, there is little to gain from showing off. Excessive lifestyles have been punished by the Party. Arguably, authoritarianism has done more to check conspicuous consumption in China than appeals to simple living in the democratic West.

  Looked at more closely, the middle classes are an amorphous bunch. In China in 2003, the 3-million-yuan ($120,000) millionaires were a world apart from the top 20 per cent urban households, with a disposable income of $2,000 a year. For most people in China, as in India and Asia more generally, being middle class does not mean going to the mall but living on the edge in a daily struggle to pay the bills for schools and hospitals. Most are anxious consumers on a budget.

  The constraints on consumption are similarly discernible in South Asia. Researchers followed clerks and professionals in Kolkata and in Siliguri, a regional town in Northern Bengal, between 1999 and 2006. Most enjoyed rising wages, owned a TV and a fridge. They greeted cable channels and shopping as progressive, even emancipating – ‘just because I’m a woman, why do I have to be stuck at home all day cooking and cleaning? I can go out and do a bit of shopping. To go shopping is what they show on television . . . This is the symbol of the new modern woman.’ At the same time, rising prices forced them to be frugal. They cut back on cinemas and restaurants, brushed their teeth with Babool instead of Colgate, and went to the library rather than the bookshop. Local sweets replaced branded snacks.48

  Many continued to rely on gifts, loans and a bit of luck to maintain the façade of middle-class comforts, in a manner that would have been all too familiar to the great theorist of capitalism, Karl Marx. Let us take a look inside the apartment of an office worker for an advertising firm in Sri Lanka in the early 1990s. The living room had a couch, two chairs and a dining table, with a lithograph of a Burmese village scene on the wall. There was a telephone, a radio, a thirteen-year-old black-and-white ‘National’ TV set and an even older tape player, broken. None of these he had bought himself. The TV was a gift from a European when he still worked as a driver. The tape deck he inherited from another employer. Furniture came from friends and family. The washing machine was on temporary loan from a neighbour who was in China on study leave. The only thing he had bought himself was the set of cheap curtains. The bulk of his salary went on food, medicine for his wife and school fees for his children.49 Market analysts have been puzzled by the tiny size of the market for second-hand goods in a poor country like India – a mere 8 per cent of radios sold in rural India were second hand.50 It may reflect an economy of mutual support and hand-me-downs as much as a belief that new is best.

  In the course of modern history, the home has been the energy cell of consumer culture. It is where comfort and convenience is generated, families store their memories and individuals shape their identities through things. What was a piecemeal transformation in the West was a revolution in China. In less than a decade, China created a nation of property-owners. By comparison, Herbert Hoover and Margaret Thatcher, the champions of home-owning democracy in the United States and Great Britain, were amateurs. In sixteen months in 1997– 98, China sold off Y8 trillion of state housing – an unprecedented transfer of wealth. Most work units sold off flats to their members at artificially low prices. The housing sale amounted to a stimulus almost as large as that of the American New Deal in 1933.51 If home owners had been made to pay market value, consumer spending would have taken a nose dive.

  Privatization shifted the orientation of life from the work unit (danwei) to the home. Until the 1990s, the danwei was a twenty-four-hour mini-society. Eating and playing, labour and sociability – life was organized by and around it. Taking a trip or booking a hotel had to be approved by the danwei. It distributed watches, clothes and other rationed goods. And it assigned housing. In this system, the home was little more than a place of shelter, and a miserable one at that. The push to industrialize in the Great Leap Forward (1958–61) proved a big step backwards for housing standards. Shortages in steel and cement put a virtual halt to modern construction. Having to rely on local materials, builders and towns in the 1960s erected simple houses made of pressed earth-walls. The overall picture was one of acute shortage, overcrowding and a lack of privacy. In 1985, the first general survey of housing found that each person, on average, had less than 4 square metres to himself. Many families cooked in corridors and shared toilets and a tap. Two years later, the Party officially buried the ideal of collective living. ‘Each unit,’ the design policy laid down, ‘must be a single house not sharing an entrance with others. It should have a bedroom, a kitchen, a bathroom and a storeroom.’52 By 2002, nine in ten homes in Shanghai were like this. The private family unit had won. Until then, space had been measured by ‘sleep-type’. Now, the state accepted that a home was a place to live, not just to sleep. A home needed to have separate spaces for recreation, sociability and study. And it needed to grow so that the TV, kitchen range, shower and washing machine could move in. Within a decade, urban homes h
ad doubled in size.

  The building boom gave millions a chance to escape into a private world. Gated communities mushroomed. One thirty-three-year-old engineer who had moved into Vanke Garden City in Shanghai explained that ‘where I grew up, my neighbours know how well I scored in my school exams; whether my family has bought new furniture and even what we cook for dinner. In my own apartment now, I do not have to face nosy neighbours who query endlessly about your private life.’53 Millions of new apartments were sold as empty shells – without fitted kitchen and bathroom, wiring or paint – which the proud owners then turned into homes of their own. In 2000, residents in Shanghai spent several years’ worth of their earnings on decorating their apartment. IKEA opened its doors in 1998. By 2006, Chinese home fabrics had reached sales of $20 billion.54 A host of home magazines and interior-design firms started to cater to dreams of ‘noble and elegant living enjoyment’, be it sleek modern Italian designer sofas or ‘England nostalgia’ with heavy oak tables and club armchairs;55 Better Homes and Gardens launched its Chinese edition in 2006.

  For the last two decades, the sociologist Deborah Davis has followed dwellers and their dwellings in Chinese cities. For many, home decorating became a second job. They visited showrooms and DIY stores during their lunch break, shopped for furniture and materials after work and checked on handymen at the weekend. Many slept for months in a single room while their flat was being done up, and afterwards wondered whether they had, perhaps, not been too extravagant. Others expressed frustration at not being able to afford what glossy magazines promised. Still, overall, what Davis’s interviews bring out is the genuine satisfaction of having been able to choose their private home and make it a reality. The majority of her subjects were born between 1948 and 1956. The Cultural Revolution had robbed them of their adolescence and young adulthood. They had to work in the countryside, sleep on pavements or squeeze in with another family. They had grown up without private space. Compared to these horrible memories, the frustrations of being a consumer with limited means were negligible. What mattered to them was that it was they who were in charge of designing their own privacy. Sleeping on the floor and waking up to a bad paint job were worth the sacrifice. As one bride put it, ‘I had the home I wanted; the renovation made us very happy (kaixin).’56 The suffering of an entire generation during the Cultural Revolution is one reason why the escalating inequalities that have come with the advance of consumer culture in China have not shaken the regime. Privacy and stability make up for relative deprivation. The question is what will happen when a new generation becomes used to private comfort and the dark memories of the 1960s recede into history.