Inscrutable shoppers: if we want to sell more to the Chinese, maybe we should find out what they actually want to buy.

• Author: Larson, Christina
• Position: As China Goes, So Goes the World: How Chinese Consumers Are Transforming Everything - Book review

As China Goes, So Goes the World: How Chinese Consumers Are Transforming Everything

by Karl Gerth

Hill & Wang, 272 pp.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Yang Xiao, a thirtysomething Chinese newspaper journalist, lives in one of the new high-rise developments on the outskirts of Beijing. Built six or seven years ago, the forty-story building complex is home to around 2,000 families--mostly young couples, some with children. A sign outside the front gate proclaims the name of the complex, "Rome," which in China today connotes imperial grandeur. The exterior architectural details are a mix of Chinese megablock style and "Old European" flourishes. The main entranceway, for instance, features a two-lane driveway passing under sandstone-colored arches, while the exteriors are adorned with decorative column-and-arch facades and what appear to be wrought iron balconies. Each vestibule boasts high ceilings and chandeliers.

Yang's home has two bedrooms (one for him and his wife, and one for his mother when she stays over), a study, a living-room area, a tiny kitchen that is tight for two people to stand in at one time, a small laundry room, a bathroom, and a basement. It has faux-wood floors and Ikea bookshelves in the study. Everywhere else the furniture is rather ornate, from the rococo bedroom set to the living area with its exaggerated versions of Louis XIV--era dining chairs, with oval backs and plush gold embroidered cushions that match those on the couch.

The furniture is, in reality, all very cheap, Yang confides. He bought it from a relative who is in the furniture resale business. Though it may seem a tad gaudy to Western sensibilities, it feels very comfortable to him in its excess. When I and another half-dozen guests arrived for a little party one summer afternoon, we assembled in the gold chairs and on the couch, pulled up a small plastic rubbish bin, and ate watermelon, tossing the rinds in the bin, and lit cigarettes, ash dusting the carpet. Together we watched the Sex and the City movie on a bootleg DVD (it wasn't legally released in Chinese theaters). The party was a "fruit party," because neither Yang nor his wife cooks--ever. They eat out every night.

The point, if I may, is simply that the consumer habits of China's 430-million-strong middle class are ever evolving and continually surprising to foreign observers. For starters, Western ideas of what "goes together" don't apply: Old European architecture is reincarnated in forty-floor...