Free When a Billion Chinese Jump by Jonathan Watts Page B

teens, brought up on
Vogue, Glamour,
and
OK!
magazines. Since entering the luxury-brand industry, she had worked for Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent, and Chanel.
    When Emily was a child, her dad bought her a
yang wawa,
a plastic Western doll with curly hair and big round eyes. She called it Fang Fang, dressed it in clothes knitted by her mum, fed it, bathed it, and played doctors and nurses with it.
    Barbies were rare in China back then. Only one of her friends, the daughter of a rich real estate agent, could afford them. Each doll cost 99 yuan. That was a lot. “I didn’t see 100-yuan notes very often back then,” Zhang recalled.
    From that age, she raced toward a Western standard of living along with the rest of Shanghai. In 1985, when she was three, her family got its first color television. In 1992, around the same time as the first Barbies went on sale in China, Emily’s family bought their first air conditioner. So did everyone in the neighborhood. Then the country. 14
    The Zhangs had their first fixed phone line installed when Emily was six. By the time she was sixteen, they were connected to the Internet. Not for the first time, I was staggered by the speed of change and China’s ability to leapfrog ahead with new technology. My family in the UK had a telephone three generations before Emily’s, but her parents went online four years earlier than mine.
    By 2006, the average person in Shanghai owned two mobile phones, 1.7 air conditioners, 1.7 color television sets, and more than one fridge and spent 14,761 yuan, about 70 percent higher than the rest of the country. 15 Demand surged for everything from cement to wood products. Shanghai residents used almost twice as much toilet paper as the average in developed nations and had a bigger carbon footprint than people in the UK. 16 The city was now consuming beyond the planet’s means, and its appetite was still growing by the day.
    Rather than being seen as unsustainable, this was more usually described as “good for business.” The rest of China was trying to follow suit. It was a matter of economic logic and street fashion. Emily’s generation could afford more than the essentials; they could buy style.
    “I’m from Shanghai. I’m a Shanghai girl. We don’t earn so much money, but we see luxury brands every day. After we see all that good stuff, we don’t want to buy anything else.”
    Emily immersed herself in the luxury industry so she could buy at a hefty discount at stock-clearance and sample sales. Most of her friends were in the industry and they shared information about sales. The first time she went, she blew a third of her salary on Fendi sunglasses.
    “It is like a fever. The price is so low that you cannot refuse. I used to go every month and buy a lot. It was like a disease.”
    Like many a proud shopper, Emily listed how much she saved rather than how much she spent. She was wearing a half-price Dior watch reduced by 2,900 yuan and Chanel shoes knocked down from 7,000 yuan to 950. In her 40-square-meter flat near Fuxing Park, she also had dozens of other bags, accessories, and clothes, including an Armani coat for 999 yuan, discounted from 9,900. Compared with friends, she said she was restrained.
    “I’ve developed the ability to control myself. The problem is, there is always a staff sale; and if you go, you buy.”
    Her taste for big-name brands sometimes took her to Hong Kong, Bali, Thailand, the Philippines, and Europe, where she could avoid the high tariffs that were slapped on designer goods in China. Besides, shopping and traveling were fun and she could afford both.
    In the previous three years, Emily’s monthly salary had increased from 3,000 yuan to just under 20,000, putting her firmly in the middle-class bracket. During moments of extreme stress, she would still gorge on a bucket of fried chicken from KFC, but usually she enjoyed haute cuisine and the high life. She ate at restaurants on weekends, had a French boyfriend, played