《文化对比阅读》(上) Unit 11--Life Styles 3. Inside Chinas Consumer Culture.docVIP

Inside China’s Consumer?Culture Joel Backaler In order to understand the future trajectory of China’s domestic consumer market, it’s important to gain an understanding of the historical context of consumerism in China. Karl Gerth is a professor at the University of Oxford who teaches modern Chinese history with an emphasis on consumer culture. He brings a truly unique perspective combining both a deep understanding of contemporary Chinese modern history with actionable business insight for the present day and beyond. Joel Backaler: In your new book, As China Goes, So Goes the World: How Chinese Consumers are Transforming Everything, one of the questions you aim to answer is: What are the implications for China and the world of hundreds of millions of Chinese people adopting Western lifestyles? Can you please highlight the most significant implications? Karl Gerth: There is, of course, no single positive or negative implication of Chinese consumerism. Rather than focus on the good or bad implications, I think it is more helpful to think of them as wide-ranging, interconnected, and often both good and bad. Take automobiles.?A few decades ago few Chinese owned cars; now China has surpassed the U.S. as the world’s largest car market.?This is good news for any number of reasons.?Who would begrudge tens of millions of Chinese the opportunity to enjoy some of the same things that we do??And thanks to Chinese consumers, multinationals such as GM, which now sells more cars in China than the U.S., rely heavily on China for their profits.?You might say many who have invested in the stock market have already been benefiting from Chinese consumerism. But there are many more implications.?China has vast ambitions to create its own national brands of everything, including automobiles.?It wants to move up the value-added chain and create a regulatory environment to promote Chinese brands.?The strategy has successes.?Already some 2 million Chinese work in their auto industry