Global Culture

A very detailed portrait of a typical middle-class chinese family serves as the background for the story The New Superpower: China’s Emerging Middle Class by Noreen O’Leary in a recent issue of Adweek Magazine. The story, intended for an audience fascinated with marketing strategies, is full of success stories of global brands making their way into the chinese market place. But it provides a lot more insight into the mindset of a new generation of consumers than other articles I’ve read recently. It is as if this new generation of chinese consumers is defined by the products they buy.

While I had provided a brief snapshot of the massive changes underway in countries like China, understanding how the social unit (the family) thinks reveals a lot more about their future than those statistics. The subject of this article is a family which does really well compared with the 3/4 of the population living in poverty but is still considered lower-middle-class with an:

annual household income equals about $26,700 a year. Much of that comes from Bin, 30, who earns 10,000 yuan ($1,280) a month in his shift job as a supervisor at car manufacturer Volkswagen; his wife earns about 5,500 yuan ($690) monthly in her IT job, including her Internet business, and her parents receive a combined 2,000 yuan ($256) in (pension) money a month. (It is the children’s obligation to support the parents, hence the Chinese three-generation social unit. However, the grandparents in this household tend to lavish much of their stipend on their “Little Emperor” grandson.) Their monthly expenses include $260 in mortgage payments and about $130 on food.

This type of families is the result of not more than 30 years of fundamental changes to their society which have enabled capitalism to flourish in a way that would be the envy of western societies. Not only they are catching up to the race and living up to the stereotype of a consumist society, this newly found middle class is not afraid to live large and understands its role in creating a powerful nation:

“Of course our life is not traditional Chinese, like my parents who worked hard and saved money. Unlike my parents who make plans for the future, we can’t plan because we have no savings. Life is a short time. I have the energy to make money and … I want to enjoy life and take good care of that time to have a better life,” she says. She expects the same for her son: “He will be even more happy than my generation because, like us, he can have whatever he wants.” Her father may not agree with his daughter’s free-spending ways, but understands and accepts it. When Deng declared “to get rich is glorious,” it was a call to action for individual Chinese to earn and spend for the greater good of China‚Äîan admonition not lost on the family patriarch. “[My children's] biggest weakness is that they don’t prepare for the future. If they use up all their money, what do they do after they age?” asks Yu Sheng. “But I am not worried about their values. Their behavior is better for the country because if they spend the money, the Chinese economy grows.”

This kind of cultural reprogramming may be the most powerful weapon of the chinese government. To be able to transform the mindset of the bulk of the population in just two generations is likely more impressive than being able to attract foreign investment.

With a strong family ethic that mandates couples to assume responsibility for their elders, they may have found the cure for the usual anxiety of planning for retirement, which is very common in our western societies. And with a large portion of these families having only one child, it is not difficult to imagine how spoiled that kid will be, conditioning this new generation for the virtues of capitalism.

Although their buying power may be limited with such income, China expects to have more than half a billion people as part of their middle-class over the next 3 or 4 decades. Such an army of devoted consumers will have drastic consequences around the globe, but the most important effect will result from their ability to remain strong to a millenia of traditions so as they find their way into the global market place, their core values and cultural preferences permeate the very same societies that are drooling for their business. Two generations have been suficient to catch up with the rest of the world, one more will be decisive in their quest for cultural survival.