When a Billion Chinese Jump

as the worst-affected city.

Diet and weight also affect the health of the planet. The demographer Joel Cohen has estimated that the earth could sustain ten billion people if everyone became a vegan.¹¹ But the opposite is happening in China. Barbie™ Burgers and the like are part of an increasingly carnivorous diet. As the country becomes wealthier, it moves ever closer to the fattening staples of the United States.¹² Each year, the average American chomps through 124 kilograms of meat, most of it beef.¹³ Fattening a cow by a kilogram requires four times as much grain and far more water than fattening a chicken by the same amount. To feed its growing livestock, China now imports huge quantities of soy, much of it from Brazil, which has resulted in accelerated clearance of Amazonian forest and Cerrado savanna for cultivation and a shifting of the irrigation pressure to Brazil and other suppliers of grain. In policymaking circles, this is known as importing “virtual water.” In practice it often means exporting environmental stress.

Shanghai’s bright cosmetic exterior has been achieved at the expense of the places that provide its resources and deal with its waste. Like many other wealthy cities around the world, the high-protein, high-octane, jetsetting lifestyle is being paid for elsewhere. As the “head of the dragon” grows hungrier and heavier, its ecological footprint is sinking deeper and wider.

At two o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon I stood in front of the imposing colonial facade of Number 18 on the Bund, where I planned to climb a step higher up the consumer ladder. During the colonial era, this had been the center of foreign power. British, French, and Japanese financial institutions built their regional headquarters here in grand styles befitting their claim to empire. By turns art deco, Gothic, baroque, and Romanesque, this promenade on the Huangpu River was home to the magnificent Cathay Hotel, the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, several shipping firms, the British consulate, the Jardine Matheson trading house, a number of telegraph companies, a customs house with a replica of Big Ben, and the Shanghai Club, where financiers, military officers, and administrators determined the fate of the natives over gin and tonics at the 30-meter “Long Bar,” at the time the biggest in the world.

After the 1949 revolution, the imperialists were kicked out and the communists requisitioned the art deco buildings for party organs and government offices. The pendulum swung again in the 1990s, when the Shanghai Club became a showcase for the nation’s reform and opening-up policy. Now the Bund was once again a bridgehead for empires, this time in the form of domestic brokerages and shipping firms and foreign retailers and restaurant franchises.

Number 18 was the former China headquarters of Standard Chartered Bank. It had recently been transformed with Taiwanese money into one of Shanghai’s premier adult playhouses. Wandering in through the giant faux Greek columns, I was instantly submerged in marketing and wealth. At one end of the mezzanine level, a dazzling gold panel provided the backdrop for three grinning statues in the Standard Times series by the contemporary artist Gao Xiaowu, at the other a guitarist and cello player strummed live Muzak behind a balustrade. I felt out of place with a scruffy beard and no socks. But nobody seemed concerned about dress code. There were even fewer customers than at the Barbie emporium. I was as much of an audience as the Muzakians were likely to get at this time on a weekday.

On the ground floor, the former bank offices had become boutiques for Cartier, Zegna, Boucheron, Patek Philippe, and A. Lange & Sohne. Up above, the sixth-floor roof terrace had been lavishly fitted out as the nightclub Bar Rouge. In between were a French-run restaurant, a contemporary art gallery, and the China headquarters of international designer brands. This, I felt, was where a real-life Barbie would come shopping and clubbing.

My guide was Emily Zhang Huijia, who had been recommended by a mutual friend as a connoisseur of consumption. She was a friendly, intelligent young woman from a middle-class family. Her mother was a hospital accountant. Her father was a lighting engineer for the Shanghai Opera. Emily was the public relations manager for Number 18 on the Bund.

Over a 48-yuan Tsingtao beer (normal retail price 3 yuan), she told me she had been a fashionista since her 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 poker every Thursday. Business and pleasure were mixed. Her favorite after-hours hangout, she said, was the building where she worked.

“Bund 18 has the coolest nightclub in Shanghai, so it is probably also the coolest in China.”

We agreed to meet there again at midnight, when she promised to introduce me to the city’s nightlife.

After dark, the illuminations on the Bund reminded me of London. There was the same weight of history in the spotlit neoclassical pillars and low-rise architecture. My British past offered no such comforting comparisons for the spectacular view on the other side of the Huangpu River, where the futuristic Pudong skyline rose higher into