Shaun Rein, a CNBC contributor, reported, “China is on the verge of overtaking Japan as the world’s largest consumer of luxury good, spending $13 billion, or 22 percent of the world total, in 2010.”
Reign says that is because it is 30 percent cheaper to buy luxury products in another country due to taxes and tariffs.
There is another reason why many Chinese tourists buy “Made in China” in other countries.
While my Chinese father-in-law and his wife were visiting in the US, I learned why Chinese buy in the US — quality.
If you read the China Law Blog, you may know that in China there are several levels of quality that do not exist in the US. When buying anything in China, there is always a risk you may end up buying a fake or the real thing but of a lower quality.
From what I have read at the China Law Blog, it seems there is no way to tell which level of quality you are buying when in China.
That doesn’t mean “Made in China” is always of a poor quality. The language of the contract between the foreign buyer such as Apple and the Chinese manufacturer is important.
In fact, most of the products Apple sells globally are assembled in China and many are manufactured there too (Apple has manufacturing facilities spread around the world but assembles most of its expensive electronic items such as the iPad in China).
This explains why the Chinese in China often if not always make sure a computer or a TV (along with other merchandise) works before buying and taking it home.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
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The world’s biggest country is going through the world’s largest sexual revolution. From the Internet to corner sex shops, China is changing. However, lost in the mix, millions of single men cannot find a date much less a mate.
Changes are talking place as China goes through the West’s 60s rebellion. Mao’s Little Red Book has been replaced with a black book filled with phone numbers and date info.
Mao’s taboos against capitalism and sex are gone. With these changes comes the dark side—drugs, prostitution, HIV and STDs. Under Mao, sexuality was almost done away with. Everyone wore the same baggy colored clothes. Everyone had the same haircut. Couples that fell in love and were caught were punished. Today, cosmetics, perfume and stylish clothes have replaced Mao’s uniforms.
Millions are learning about romance and love. However, millions of others have been left with sexual, psychological problems and are very ignorant about sex. They were victims of Mao’s Cultural Revolution‘s sexual repression.
According to a 2004 survey, only twenty percent of Chinese men know where to find the clitoris, while fifty percent of Chinese women haven’t had an orgasm. Sexual ignorance and dysfunction is common. Mao’s Cultural Revolution left invisible scars.
China also has a new, popular holiday,Valentine’s Day. On February 14, cupid and roses have become fashionable. Nightclubs hold Valentine’s festivals where couples meet, drug use is common and kissing leads to sex.
Private businesses that cater to romance and sex are flourishing in China. Some shops are a cross between a sexual education center that also sells adult sex toys. In Beijing, there are an estimated five thousand sex shops and business is booming. This industry is worth billions.
When the first graphic sex Blog came online, the server crashed and was down for days. When the government censors shut down a sex Blog, more replace it.
In China today, teen girls are living lives their parents never imagined and do not understand. The teens are very open about what turns them on in a guy. Many do not care what their parents think. They only want to have fun.
Listening to the conversation between this group of Chinese girls sounds like listening to spoiled kids in the US talking.
The teens often go out clubbing and the nightclubs are equal to or better than the best in the West. The nightclub featured in the video has life-sized wall paintings from Cultural Revolution posters while teens dressed in sexy clothes dance and grind to loud music. These changes started in the late 1990s.
Even in China’s rural villages, the sexual revolution has been felt as millions of young women leave the villages to the big cities and experience what the urban Chinese are doing. The first stop is the hair salon.
The media is even climbing on board this sexual revolution. Glitzy magazines, like the Chinese edition of Cosmopolitan, feature the stylish, hot and sexy.
China’s one-child policy, created to control the growth of the population, is complicating the sexual revolution.
By ending the pressure on Chinese women to have many children, this has liberated them to do other things. Now Chinese women have the freedom to get an education and find a paying job.
The one-child policy also created another problem. Since Chinese families have always favored having boys, many women get abortions when the fetus is identified as a female. This has led to a growing imbalance between the number of men and women.
Now, millions of poor men cannot find a mate. With so many poor men unable to find women, gangs and crime have become a problem.
China now has the fastest growing sex industry in the world. A decade ago, there was little prostitution. Today, there are many brothels masquerading as massage parlors. Some are modeled after the brothels in Thailand.
Capitalism has arrived in all its guises, and the same problems the US has with sex slavery and drugs is now a problem for China too.
Most prostitutes are village girls and have no idea about safe sex. This is causing an increase in HIV. Many of the men refuse to wear condoms. Sometimes, when the girl says no, the paying customer will rape her.
The sexual revolution in China is a fragile one. While the new China supports it, the old China is afraid of these changes. Adultery and divorce are on the rise. Kids are leaving home. There is a growing generation gap.
One older Chinese man says that China is not used to this. Under pressure from the older generation, the police must crack down, raid bordellos and arrest prostitutes.
However, now that China’s sexual revolution is in the open, it will be hard to stop. At first, the government tried to stop what was going on but soon backed off. In addition, many parents, who grew up in Mao’s puritanical era, don’t want their children to experience the same repression.
These changes are talking place while women are gaining power and many families now value having female children. Few want to return to the way things were.
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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The Economist’s cover for the March 12, 2011 issue of what the British call a newspaper disguised as a magazine had a cover with Bamboo Capitalismsplashed in big print over a picture of a bamboo forest with people riding red butterflies.
The Economist says, “China’s success owes more to its entrepreneurs than its bureaucrats.”
True, but The Economist also says China’s economic success has often been vaguely attributed to “capitalism with Chinese characteristics”… taken to mean, “Bureaucrats with heavy, visible hands have worked much of the magic.”
Hmm, I never saw it that way. I don’t think the Party in Beijing sees it that way either or cares what anyone in the West thinks.
Although The Economist goes on to point out that government bureaucrats have less to do with China’s success than most think, it is a fact that government intervention in China’s economy helped China survive the 2008 global financial crises caused by America’s obese, debt ridden, diabetic, cancerous capitalist economy, which I have termed Bald Eagle Capitalism.
Bamboo Capitalism is a good term to identify China’s “capitalism with Chinese characteristics”. In China, bamboo is considered a symbol of luck. It is flexible. People may eat part of it. It stays green most of the time. It is used in construction, to cook food, make floors, furniture, etc. In ancient times, warriors used bamboo as armor.
The flexible way Chinese entrepreneurs are allowed to do business is the primary reason for China’s economic success, but the central government’s control over property values and banking also deserves credit — an area the US government turned a blind eye to, which led to the 2008 global financial crises and about 64 trillion dollars in global losses along with tens of millions of lost jobs around the world.
The documentary Inside Jobrevealed the infamous Wall Street architects of the 2008 global financial crises and how they are still in charge at the same jobs where they caused the crash in the first place.
If these same men and women had lived in China, China’s bureaucrats may have quickly executed them so the same crises might not happen again as soon as it may repeat in the West.
In fact, Bald Eagle Capitalism is a fit term to describe the US economic system.
The Bald Eagle is not only the national bird, it is a bird of prey and although it will eat fresh fish, its primary source of food is from carrion, which vultures (a term to describe the people behind the 2008 global financial crises) feed on too.
The Bald Eagle’s diet is opportunistic and varied. The Bald Eagle will also eat the garbage from campsites, picnics and dumps.
Bald Eagles are an endangered species, as is the American economy.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
You may be surprised to learn that the British Empire started this cycle of theft in the 19th century.
In the 18th century, China was the most advanced nation on the planet. In 1793, China’s Qianlong Emperor sent a letterto King George III of Britain. The emperor made it known that, “As your Ambassador can see for himself, we possess all things. I set no value on objects strange or ingenious, and have no use for your country’s manufactures.”
Then the Industrial Revolution started in England but wasn’t felt until the 1830s or 1840s. After almost two thousand years, the West had an advantage and used it.
The author, Sarah Rose, tells the story of how, before 1848, China was the only country that knew how to grow and make tea. The British sent botanist Robert Fortune deep within China to steal plants to grow on British plantations in India.
In addition, by the 1830s, the English had become the major drug-trafficking criminal organization in the world; very few drug cartels of the twentieth century can even touch the England of the early nineteenth century in sheer size of criminality.
By the 1840s, the British and French fleets sailed into China’s rivers and destroyed its fleets forcing China to bend to the will of the West. Besides Western opium trade and the theft of China’s tea, Britain and France forced China’s emperor to allow Christian missionaries free access to Chinese everywhere.
Today, with China’s rise as a major economic and military power, it seems that theft may be changing history again but this time the wind blows from the East to the West.
However, in an attempt to keep the power, Europe and America came up with a new set of rules making the kind of theft they used in the 19th century wrong.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
Johnson wrote, “China has secret weaknesses. Its most serious: gambling and drug addiction. China’s new prosperity is already producing a rapid expansion of the country’s international gambling class, not to mention an appreciable increase in the number of drug addicts.”
What Johnson says of China isn’t a secret.
In fact, North America is by far the king of global gambling and drug use — something Johnson doesn’t mention.
From Illegal Drug Trade in the People’s Republic of China, we learn “there are over 900,000 registered drug addicts in China, but the Government recognizes that the actual number of users is far higher. Some unofficial estimates range as high as 12 million.”
When we compare China’s figures with the US, we discover that “an estimated 12.8 million Americans, about 6 percent of the household population aged twelve and older, use illegal drugs on a current basis (within the past thirty days).…” Source: NCJRS.gov
If these numbers are correct, China and the US have about the same number of illegal drug users. However, China has five times the people, which mean 6% of Americans are addicted to drugs while less than one percent of Chinese are.
How about Johnson’s claim that the Chinese have a secret sickness for gambling? The answer may be found at Global Economics of Gambling (GEG).
From GEG, I learned that in 2006, revenues from gambling in America were 94.9 billion dollars while they were only 5.1 billion in China.
I have a question for Paul Johnson, “Why are you focusing on China when North America has more of a problem with gambling and drug use than China has?”
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
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