Consumption upgrade, a good investment
China’s “consumption upgrade” isn’t just about spending more on expensive products and services. It’s a cultural reboot: From it, a higher level of consciousness is evolving.
This novel approach to thinking and life itself — a new era, if you will — is evident across the board. It can be glimpsed in President Xi Jinping’s proactive, refreshing and sage attempt to recast troubled relations with India, China’s biggest neighbor, in a peace-oriented mold.
It can be also discerned in the philosophy of Candy, a Xinjiang homemakerturned-Beijing businesswoman. Candy portrays her ice cream-like frozen yogurt business as an attempt to encourage people, especially scholars from the next-door, utterly cosmopolitan university, to befriend and “treat” each other in a “healthy” way, and realize “life is beautiful”, sweet, meant to be enjoyed and lived in peace and amity.
This emerging sensitivity to, or affinity for, finer thoughts and ideas, is ubiquitous. Perhaps nowhere is it more evident in a concentrated form than at the brand new mall atop Beijing’s Anzhenmen subway station.
It symbolizes New China, and challenges the notion that malls are breeding grounds for crass consumerism. At restaurants on multiple levels, you can savor a melange of cuisines not just from China but the world. Not just restaurants, each and every commercial establishment in the mall appears to embody a fine thought, an elevated level of consciousness.
A consumer can feast on fine food amid ultrafine ambience, a combination that eases the mind into finer realms. Female consumers can learn to make healthy DIY lipsticks at a shop that champions green cosmetics. A swanky yoga studio underlines the union of mind, body and spirit.
A new age bookstore-cumcafe stocks Chinese translations of a very large number of Western bestsellers, including one by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella — tomes that stimulate thought and compel one to reflect on deeper meanings of life. Younger Chinese parents seem eager to introduce their kids to such meanings.
Such global outlook is also visible at cinemas, where Chinese audiences enjoy Hollywood’s Ready Player One and Bollywood’s Hindi Medium (dubbed into Chinese), movies that don’t just entertain but make you think.
“George”, a young Chinese chef from Shandong province who specializes in Sichuan cuisine and works at a mall restaurant, speaks flawless English confidently. To me, the self-taught George represents many Chinese who enroll into English and foreign language institutes to expand their horizons.
Scores of mall-bound consumers take several minutes off to enjoy and applaud urban busker bands on the sidewalk; they also appreciate the music and songs of rural alms-seekers at street corners.
It’s not a mall-specific phenomenon. Off Beitucheng East Road, “WinEaTalk” (that is, wine-eat-talk, a theme restaurant) demonstrates that drinking expensive imported wine isn’t decadence. Instead, exuding imagination, the WiFi-, projectorand screen-enabled facility with meeting rooms seamlessly blends disparate ideas for a heady cocktail: You can drink, eat and pitch startup ideas to investors, or brainstorm during a board meeting, or discuss a PhD thesis with a professor.
The emerging wave of higher consciousness at individual/ family level could be harnessed to enrich society as well, to put an end to things like flagrant misuse of shared bicycles, graveyards of millions of such bikes, and telecom, online and financial frauds.