Empire of Things

by Frank Trentmann

  In Indian cities, the middle classes started to put gates around their neighbourhoods in the 1980s. In the United States, such gated communities have been synonymous with privatism. In India, by contrast, the precarious state of basic services has drawn the middle classes into public life and into working with the municipal authorities, which, in a city like Delhi, continue to run water and other services. Such Resident Welfare Associations have evolved into their own hybrid of civic participation and controlled sociability.100 On the one hand, RWAs promise a refuge from the dangers of the street and unwanted outsiders. Private life and social leisure are safe. Residents organize their own national and religious festivals, dance competitions and consumer fairs. On the other hand, the very premium placed on a lifestyle of comfort and security has drawn residents out of their private shell into working more directly with the municipal authorities. Many RWAs offer a secure water supply and twenty-four-hour power back-up, a not insignificant attraction in a city where disruption is the norm. While friends elsewhere face black-outs, families in an RWA can watch TV, run the washing machine and use their computers. For the city government desperate to improve services, these neighbourhood bodies conveniently organize consumers with a keen interest in things running smoothly. Since 2001, the Delhi government and the RWAs have entered into a kind of private–public partnership. In workshops and meetings, residents sit down with deputies, police and water officials to identify solutions to local problems. In the Bhagidari Scheme, more than a hundred associations work with the Delhi authorities on everything from curbing waste to harvesting rain water. Residents even help collect payment on water and electricity bills. If there has been criticism, it has been about residents not having more power to punish culprits or switch to private services.101

  In Japan, the springtime of consumer movements were the years immediately following the Second World War. Nihon Shufurengōkai (All-Japan Housewives’ Association), better known as Shufuren, was born in 1948. The regional Kansai Shufuren (Kansai federation of housewives) followed the year after; Chifuren, a more diverse, pro-business group, in 1952. American occupation and support for liberal democracy fostered associational life. In its first year, Shufuren attracted half a million members in Tokyo alone. In Japan, as in Germany, it was war and scarcity that shaped the worldview of the first generation of consumer activists. Their main concern was not variety but survival. Shufuren picked the rice paddle (oshamoji) as its symbol. The fight was for fairer rationing, an end to the black market and, most of all, food safety. In 1951, Shufuren’s early testing facilities revealed that pickled radish contained carcinogenic dye. The case was heavily publicized and prompted a government ban of the substance, and made adulteration public enemy number one.

  In India, consumer politics was the product of a weak state and a relatively strong civil society. In Japan, it was shaped by a strong state and economic nationalism. If housewives’ associations were gaining in strength, the state and producers were even stronger. The political system favoured producer groups. Internal divisions between consumer groups did not help. It was not until 1970 that they formed a united front, in a boycott against overpriced colour TVs; MITI caved in on that occasion. Ultimately, the relative weakness of Japanese associations had ideological roots. To be effective, consumers, like other groups, have to define themselves against someone. In Britain and the United States, that enemy was the producer, sometimes the state; in these commercial societies, guilds, corporate mentalities and dependence on local producers had weakened early. In Japan, by contrast, as in imperial Germany before, identities were less differentiated. The ideal was that of seikatsusha, a person who tried to harmonize the interests of consumer, farmer and producer.

  A weak tradition of civic rights limited consumer influence further. Consumers had obligations, not rights. In 1968, the government passed the Consumer Protection Basic Law. For the first time, consumers were recognized as a unique and often vulnerable group, but they were to be helped by a paternalist state, not empowered. The state was authorized to set safety standards, ensure fair competition and provide citizens with relevant information. The role of consumers was to act ‘self-reliantly and rationally’ in the marketplace. In the following decade, the state branched out into consumer education – previously the preserve of the housewives’ associations – and set up its own network of well-funded local consumer centres, testing facilities and lifestyle consultants. Rights were little more than an afterthought and formally recognized only in the revised Consumer Basic Law of 2004.102 Policies since then have put the spotlight on ‘consumer citizens’, whose everyday behaviour holds the key to ‘a fair market, social value and higher level of spiritual richness’, in the words of the Japanese Cabinet Office.103 In the West, it has been tempting to see such discourse as a novel product of neo-liberal markets and governmentality, which asks people to rule themselves.104 The Japanese case suggests it can be consistent with state paternalism, too.

  Communist China offers an extreme version of the symbiosis between consumerism and authoritarianism. Instead of greater choice in the shopping mall generating a demand for choice at the ballot box – the Anglo-Saxon democratic trajectory – China has proven the state’s ability to co-opt consumers. Consumer politics in China takes the form of a stable non-aggression pact. The regime guarantees its subjects greater comfort and consumer protection. In exchange, consumers direct their anger at fraudulent shopkeepers and property speculators, and agree not to invade the political domain controlled by the Party. For both, fear of upheaval cements the alliance.

  The consumer movement in China has been the creature of the state. In itself, this is not as odd as it might seem to liberal readers. Even in the West, there were cases like Imperial Germany, where it was the state that had breathed life into the consumer movement in an effort to harness national resources during the First World War. What sets China apart, in addition to the lack of parliamentary institutions, is that state-driven consumer activism is not an emergency war measure but a normal part of peace-time politics. A responsible, vocal consumer has become the partner of an authoritarian state committed to rapid growth. In Western countries, it took social movements many generations of pressure and campaigning until consumer rights found their way into law. In China, Party rulers simply pressed fast forward and enacted it from the top. On 31 October 1993, the Eighth National People’s Congress passed the ‘Law of the People’s Republic of China on Protecting Consumers’ Rights and Interests’. In it, the state took it upon itself to ‘protect the legitimate right and interests of consumers’ (art. 5). All sections of society shared the responsibility to protect their interests (art. 6). Consumers were entitled to the safety of their person and property, to correct information, quality assurance and accurate measures and to choose their own goods and services (arts. 7–10). In addition, consumers had the right to compensation and to form groups to safeguard their ‘legitimate interests.’105

  After having virtually disappeared from the Chinese lexicon during the Cultural Revolution, ‘the consumer’ (xiaofeizhe) enjoyed a big comeback in the 1990s. The Party newspaper People’s Daily began to invoke it even more often than ‘the worker’. Consumers gained their own TV slots (Focus) and radio programmes (Consumer’s Friend). It is tempting to see this as a belated catching-up with the touted triumph of the consumer in the West, but differences remain. Communist China has so far avoided the narrowing of the consumer into the end-user, so characteristic of the contemporary liberal West. Consumer rights are aimed at rural farmers as much as at urban shoppers. In an effort to boost production, government agencies have distributed hundreds of thousands of legal handbooks to farmers informing them of their rights as consumers to decent seeds and tools. Farmers have brought class-action suits over sub-standard fertilizers. In that sense, China has kept alive part of an older tradition where consumption stood more broadly for the using up of resources, from the raw material to the finished article.

  Activism has taken one of
two forms: class-action suits and government-sponsored campaigns. A new culture of litigation has sprung up. In 1994 Beijing, three hundred consumers sued six department stores and wholesalers when they realized that the anniversary Mao watch they had bought was not, contrary to adverts, made with real gold and diamonds. A district court in the capital then took out its own newspaper advert and urged anyone else who felt cheated to register their name with the court. In the end, the court ordered the shops to refund the purchase price and to pay legal costs and damages of 3000 yuan per watch. Article 49 of the Consumer Rights Law set the amount of compensation at double the purchase price. Spotting a fake became a lucrative enterprise. From being a small trader in Beijing, Wang Hai rose to media celebrity by exposing a string of fake Sony earphones and counterfeit designer bags. By 1998, he had a dozen fake-busters working for him. But China’s answer to Ralph Nader did not take on corrupt institutions, nor did he become a political maverick. Instead, he became the darling of the state. Communist leaders invited him along to meet US President Clinton, celebrating him as a new kind of communist hero who showed it was possible to work for the good of society and make money at the same time.106

  The regime’s watchdog is the China Consumer Association (Zhongguo Xiaofeizhe Xiehui). Founded in 1984, the CCA oversees consumer education and protection and acts as a local whistle-blower and people’s lawyer. It runs food-safety contests on local TV, teaches consumer songs to schoolchildren, organizes ‘green shopping day’ and holds annual competitions for the ‘top ten annoying’ complaints; household electronics, including after-sale service, and clothing topped the list in 2012. And it gives advice to consumers who have been cheated. In its first twenty years it handled over 8 million complaints. The range of cases they have dealt with is mindboggling, from the four hundred proud homeowners in Beijing who, on taking possession of their apartment, found that its square footage had shrunk and the promised garden had disappeared from the contracted design, to the forty families who felt cheated by a private coaching school which had advertised that a bit of tutoring and Y20,000 would secure their children a place at a top university. By 1997, the CCA had over 100,000 ‘volunteers’ working for it. Many of these were local officials, but they also included employees in companies and department stores co-opted to address problems at the point of production.107

  There are two main reasons the regime has been so keen to mobilize consumers. The first is productivity. In a country with poor product standards, vocal consumers perform the job of quality-assurance monitors. No one wants to buy shoes that come apart or cars with stalling engines. For a regime eager to move up the value chain, it makes good sense to celebrate consumer day with a bonfire of fakes. Countries do not get rich on counterfeit DVDs and Rolexes. In addition to cheering on vigilant shoppers, the CCA works with companies and other branches of the state, such as the Administration of Quality Inspection, to raise standards and pre-empt complaints. Faulty products from abroad give additional joy to consumer nationalists; in 2002–4, publicity centred on the safety flaws of the Korean-made MB 100 van and the poor service of a Japanese airline. China’s entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001 gave consumer protection added significance. As formal barriers to foreign products had to go, other ways to help domestic products gained in significance. Creating demanding shoppers who will pick Chinese products is part of that strategy. Communist rulers today operate in a spirit of consumer nationalism that reaches back to the mass boycotts of foreign goods in the national-products campaign of the early twentieth century.108 The methods may have changed – the regime today has its own branding policy, complete with a government commission that runs over a hundred corporations. But the goal is the same: make the people buy Chinese.

  The second reason is stability. A state-led movement defuses potential conflict. It positions the state as the friend of the helpless shopper in the battle against crooks and fraudsters; tellingly, a new consumer law in 2014 introduced class-action suits but required these to be brought by the official CCA. By providing some organizational structure and setting aside a limited space for protest, consumer protection and home-owner associations also prevent tensions from spinning too far out of control, especially in the ground war with speculators and land developers. In the liberal West, consumer politics put the flashlight on the asymmetry of power. In Communist China, its effect has been to obscure it. Frustration and anger are traced back to an imperfect market, not an imperfect political system. Consumer politics has thus added a dose of soft power to the harder thump of the baton.

  Democracy was not accomplished overnight in the West, and it is prudent to recall Western bursts of authoritarian reaction and repression before faulting China for not making faster progress. Historically, what sets China apart from other non-democratic societies is the confident way in which an authoritarian regime has gripped consumption as a tool of political power. The ruling elite in eighteenth-century Britain treated consumers as lesser beings to be squeezed with taxes and regulations. Socialist regimes in the twentieth century saw them either as a selfish enemy who had to be rooted out or, at best, as reformable creatures in need of the state’s guiding hand. Communist China rules with consumers, not against them. This is what is unprecedented. People are allowed their private pleasures and comforts, but, in exchange, they are expected to become ‘scientific’ and ‘civilized’ consumers. This means that they must break with gambling, porn and other unhealthy habits, and instead learn to balance body and mind, respect the environment and ‘actively participate in social supervision’, be it protesting about bad fertilizers or burning counterfeit videos. Only in this way will China be able to enjoy ‘market order’ and ‘social harmony’.109

  The constant appeals to the consumer and, since 2005, to a ‘harmonious society’ are more than rhetoric. They are about behaviour change, an early-twenty-first-century version of the ‘new life’ movement that sprang up in Japan a century earlier. As in Japan then, so in China now, the aim is to wean people off old customs and make them more discerning, efficient and self-reliant. The goal, however, is not simply to create the rational market actors so beloved by economists. China is more ambitious than that. It is about cultivating the social and moral qualities needed to live together peacefully in a new material world made up of new towns and neighbours, comforts and frustrations, dangers and temptations. In early modern Europe, books of manners taught the middling sort how to be polite. In China, the civilizing process is a joint project of state and business. The Party, developers and home owners have taken over Mao’s project of building a new man. Official guidebooks explain ‘How to be a Lovely Shanghainese’ with advice on everything from appropriate dress and hospitality to how to behave in a public toilet. Volunteers demonstrate how to queue. In new cities and suburbs, housing developers engineer microcosms of social harmony. Developers in Chengdu, in Sichuan province – home of the giant panda – for example, have their own ‘lifestyle office’ (shenghuo fangshi ban). In addition to putting residents in touch with travel agents and the latest show, it organizes collective leisure activities. Elsewhere in the city, on parkland freshly reclaimed from a garbage dump, a developer put on social events for a year to enlist home-buyers from the start in creating the right ambience. Consumers are expected to do their bit in building a community with a high suzhi, or high-quality lifestyle.110 Indeed, their contribution is vital if new urban spaces and the cultural vacuum left behind by work units are to be filled with the safety, sociability and decorum needed to enjoy the pleasures of privacy. Chinese consumers might not be citizens in the democratic sense, but nor are they just customers in the commercial sense. Their official elevation to ‘god’ is closer to the truth. After all, they are expected to create their own consumer paradise.

  China, India, Japan and South Korea today are consuming societies marked by notable differences, from their propensity to spend to the exercise of rights. In that sense it is misleading to speak of the ‘Asian consumer’ or to expect,
as marketing gurus like to do, that history will repeat itself, as purchasing power spreads across the continent. Nonetheless, looked at in the round, there are also similar patterns that set the experience of these countries apart from the West, especially Britain and the United States. In the Far East, the state and nationalism were the driving forces of expansion. Business was a junior partner. It was the state that acted as the schoolmaster for a new generation of consumers, teaching them how to save and spend. Getting and spending were legitimized in relation to national strength and social solidarity. In no Western country did consumption, state formation and development form such a tight bond.

  Possessions, too, have functioned differently. Liberal commercial societies in the West championed a dominion of things that privileged private pleasure and comfort. People invested in being a master over things, rather than over other people. This fostered a more inward-looking material culture, with attention increasingly lavished on private possessions rather than on social networks. That this process was never pure and complete should not blind us to the general rise of this material privatism. What is extraordinary about East Asia as well as India, is how these societies have welcomed things without ditching people. Customary festivities have retained their significance alongside possessions. Where in the West do weddings and funerals consume multiple annual salaries? Luxury is a mass market in these new rich societies, because branded handbags and designer labels are about belonging, rather than distinction. Privatism, to be sure, has been on the rise in Japan, China and India, but it continues to be moderated by spending on social networks, the extended family and gifts for friends and superiors. The big question now, to which only a future historian will have the answer, is whether, with the parallel rise of wealth and inequality, consumption will continue to work as a social glue or, rather, start to dissolve the social fabric of these nations.