Consumption as a spiritual quest
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Shanghai Daily, December 16, 2011
As 2011 approaches its end, in freezing cold and pervading haze, enthusiastic shoppers are heading to one shopping mecca after another, scouring for discounts, bargains, and "free" iPads.
There have been warnings of stampedes, scams and markups disguised as discounts, but all these seem only to heighten the pleasure of the shopping adventure.
Viewing this exhilarating spending spree, one might easily forget we have just seen one of the worst periods of inflation in decades.
Significantly, these frenzied shoppers are not shopping for bread. They are shopping for style, to publicize the fact that they are aspiring to the good life.
From faith in bread to faith in a rotten apple, with a missing bite, the leap is revolutionary. A loaf of bread is physically limited, a rotten apple is a logo, with infinite potential for imagination, and profit.
Of course, the apple product's nominal function of communication still serves to reify the image it projects, just as a LV handbag can still hold things.
Predictably, given the orthodoxy about the need for growth, in times of slowed consumption, nearly all governments ("economies") are talking about "expanding demand."
In China successfully branded liquor has become a luxury item whose profitability is closer to that of property development.
A bottle of Moutai liquor priced at 500 to 600 yuan (US$80-95) four years ago now fetches a price of 2,000 yuan.
It has been observed that government expenditures play an important role in fueling the consumption of Moutai.
As the saying goes, "Those who buy never drink it, and those who drink never buy."
As consumption has become a salient feature of cosmopolitan engagement, it deserves more academic attention than it gets.
In an article titled "Liquidity, middle class and urban space," (September 26, Wenhui Daily) researcher Bao Yaming from Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences points to rampant liquidity and a widening wealth gap in the wake of globalization.
As Bao concludes, the vanishing middle class and the gaping divide between the haves and have-nots is not unique to the United States.
Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman's conception of liquid modernity, as cited in Bao's article, gives a more systematic analysis of consumption that has come to define the urban landscape, and modernity.
Bauman pays particular attention to the sense of rootlessness in all modern interactions.
In an agrarian society that China once was, a person lives off soil, and is dependent on people around him. This affinity dictates a set of rituals and code of morality.
Thus, it was not for fear of starvation that cultivation of crops had been encouraged by all dynasties.
In his "On making grains more valuable," statesman Chao Cuo (200-154 BC) explained to the monarch why tilling the land is important.
"Vice stems from poverty, while poverty stems from lack of soil cultivation ... and lacking cultivating will make peasants prone to leave their hometown, like birds or beasts. This flight cannot be curbed even by building high walls or digging deep moats," Chao wrote.
Here scholar Liang Qichao's observation over 90 years ago about the impact of industrialization in Europe is still relevant.
Liang observed that as a large amount of labor was gathered in one marketplace or factory where they sell their labor, they are estranged from each other except in material terms, and lacking anything substantial to anchor them, they drift along, in constant fear of being uprooted, their nerves constantly frayed in dealing with the demand of urban life in its myriad complications.
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