When a Billion Chinese Jump

The resident of Number 550 Huaihai Road in Shanghai was a rather unusual migrant. Born in Wisconsin on March 9, 1959, Barbara Millicent Roberts was the world’s most famous supermodel. She drove a Corvette convertible, owned a dream home with a pool, partied with jocks, and adored shopping. In the U.S., she had been a prom queen and a role model. In China, she was emerging as an ambassador for consumer culture.

Better known as Barbie, this 30-centimeter-tall icon had spawned a billion plastic clones and encouraged generations of women across the world to pursue the 1950s American dream. Fashion was her passion. Her looks were her life. The world’s best plastic surgeons had sculpted her features, given her a gravity-defying bust, and ensured that she would never grow old. Giorgio Armani, Versace, and Christian Lacroix had personally designed her wardrobe, but her consumer addiction was impossible to satisfy. Even as she accumulated accessories, furniture, and cars, the world’s most famous shopaholic repeated the same question in the same tinny tones year after year: “Will we ever have enough clothes?”

Barbie was first sold in China in the early 1990s. But it was not until 2009 that she was given her own home in the retail heartland of Shanghai. In a blaze of pink and blond, Mattel, the world’s biggest toy company, marked its leading cash cow’s fiftieth birthday by opening the planet’s largest Barbie emporium. Covered in pink plastic, the six-story doll’s house on Huaihai Road, in the heart of the city’s shopping district, became an instant landmark. At the launch party, kung fu star Jet Li and the actress Christy Chung were among the celebrities quaffing champagne and cocktails on a spiral staircase bedecked with plastic blondes.

This was more than a party; it was the launch of a marketing campaign aimed at prolonging and expanding the plastic lifestyle championed by the toy firm. For the Barbie market to continue growing for another fifty years, the doll would have to make it big in China.

I lunched at Barbie’s place at the start of what became a social climb up Shanghai’s consumer hierarchy. The top floor of the doll’s house was a fantastically kitschy themed restaurant with a menu designed by the chef David Laris. It offered Barbie™ Burgers for 60 yuan with Barbie™ pink sauce, Ken’s burgers, Pinktastic Pasta, Doll-icious Desserts, and Barbie™ Tini cocktails. The restaurant did not seem to be hugely popular, which might explain the generous promotion offer. Diners who opted for the special meal received a boxed set of Barbie plates and cutlery that they could take home.

I wasn’t one of them. But after polishing off a Barbie™ Burger, I chatted to a customer who was delighted at her takeaway tea set. Liu Yunting was an advertising company employee who had come with a friend to mooch around the doll’s shop and in-house spa. They could not afford Barbie dolls as kids, but now they could eat, drink, and soak up the Barbie atmosphere. I asked Liu what she planned to do with her new tableware.

“I will use it myself.”

“Isn’t it a little childish?”

“Not at all. It is cute. This is much better than the stuff for children. We know better how to appreciate it.”

Liu was a member of the fastest-growing consumer class: single women—or xiaobailing (white-collar princesses).² Just like the “office ladies” of Japan, they had high levels of disposable income and a craving for designer labels. Marketing moguls were obsessed by this group. They were the future face of consumer power. State planners forecast that half the population would be middle class by 2020.³ As this upwardly mobile group was growing, consuming more, and traveling farther, they were getting ever closer to the unsustainable, energy-intensive Barbie lifestyle.

For over half a century Barbie has been the ecological equivalent of a weapon of mass destruction. The doll’s plasticity became the subject of much postmodern self-parody in the Barbie emporium. Accessories were decked with English slogans such as “A plastic tan never fades,” and the skincare products boasted “plastic smooth” results. Unrivaled in her ability to influence young minds, she was the perfect saleswoman for a fantasy lifestyle that, scaled-up and replicated, was proving calamitous.

The size of Barbie’s eco-footprint was belied by her petite slingbacks. With a garage full of cars, a huge home, and a penchant for foreign travel and shopping, her carbon consumption would be off the scale in the real world. If little girls in China grew up wanting to shop, eat, and travel like Barbie, the planet’s prognosis would shift from touch-and-go to terminal.

Until very recently, China has been living within the planet’s means. If everyone in the world consumed what the average Mr. or Mrs. Wang did in 2007, we would just about stay within the sustainable resources of our planet.⁴ Humanity would have a balanced ecological budget.

But, understandably, Mr. and Mrs. Wang wanted to keep up with Mr. and Mrs. Jones on the other side of the Pacific. That was human nature. It was also very bad news for the environment, because if we all ate, shopped, and traveled like those average Americans, we would need 4.5 earths. If we all lived like Barbara Millicent Roberts, the situation would be even worse.⁵

In the United States, appalling damage had been done for decades. The situation was only slightly less serious in western Europe. In China, that Barbie-dream apocalypse was closest to coming true in Shanghai. The city that Deng Xiaoping called “the head of the dragon” was the biggest, richest, most globalized mass of modernity in the country. This was the home of the most luxury shopping malls, the tallest buildings, the nation’s first F1 track, the biggest auto companies, the only commercially operating Maglev train, the second-busiest port in the world, and a gathering horde of international salesmen trying to sell the American consumer lifestyle.⁶

The planet’s biggest corporations were depending on the Wangs catching up with the Joneses (and the Robertses). The United States had shopped until its economy dropped. Sinking in debt, plagued by obesity, and increasingly dependent on military might to protect its lifestyle, the world’s superconsumer was groaning with indigestion. Europe was too decrepit and conservative to take up the slack, so global manufacturers, retailers, and restaurant chains were desperate to stimulate the Chinese appetite.

Shanghai was their beachhead. While information firms and political lobbyists headed to Beijing and manufacturers flocked to Guangzhou, retail giants almost invariably chose Shanghai as the base for their China headquarters and their first showrooms. From Kentucky Fried Chicken, McDonald’s, and Starbucks to Louis Vuitton, Gucci, and Chanel, international brands made the city a giant shopping mall. Shanghai’s skies were filled with spectacular towers that hosted the offices of global corporations, while its suburbs sprawled outward with the luxury villas of the marketing managers, PR consultants, and advertising executives.

Judging by appearances, Shanghai was a source of environmental optimism. The city has used its wealth to clean up the streets, air, and rivers, to upgrade transport infrastructure, and to relocate polluters.⁷ Such was the improvement that the city was often cited as a model in China.

Stroll down the Huaihai Road and the transformation was evident. Most of the colonial-era buildings in this part of the French Concession had been torn down and replaced by boutiques and department stores. Out had gone old family-run stores and local brands, such as Three Gun Underwear. In had come Adidas, Mothercare, H&M, Zara, Costa Coffee, and stalls selling Heineken and Coca-Cola. In quieter side streets, the former residences of the European traders had become upmarket salons for Dunhill and Vacheron Constantin.

Consumers had never had more options. America’s Wal-Mart, France’s Carrefour, Britain’s Tesco, and Japan’s Ito-Yokado were expanding in China faster than in any other country. Each year they opened hundreds of new stores in the expectation that Chinese consumption would surge as more rural migrants moved into cities and worked their way into the middle class.

Young urbanites were becoming as enthusiastic about french fries, burgers, and fried chicken as their counterparts in New York or London. When the first Kentucky Fried Chicken opened near Tiananmen Square in 1987, it was seen as a novel Western dining experience. Twenty years later, the company had 2,000 outlets in 400 cities, employing 200,000 people, making it easily the biggest restaurant chain in China.⁸ In roughly the same period, McDonald’s had grown from one restaurant to 800. Dozens of other fast-food outlets tried to mimic their success. Along with the changing diet came a surge in obesity, diabetes, and heart disease.

As in other countries, the arrival of the Barbie ideal came at a time when real body shapes were moving in the opposite direction. Obese children used to be rare in China. Due to the country’s history of famine, plumpness had long been seen as a sign of health and prosperity. Even adults take a certain pride in a bulging belly. Men in the north used to roll up their shirts in the summer to show their jiangjun du or General’s Belly.⁹ But now General’s Bellies are everywhere. In Shanghai, they even have a new name: XO Bellies—after the cognac favored by business executives and senior officials. As in the rest of the world, China has rapidly grown obese, with nearly 15 percent of the population overweight.¹⁰ Shanghai is often cited