ABSTRACT
One of the most visible features distinguishing the early years of reform in the 1980s from the previous 30 years of revolution was the rise in incomes and shift in emphasis from production, work and worker-comrade to consumption, lifestyle and the consumer. Indeed it became common over the next thirty years of reform to talk of China’s ‘consumer revolution’ to denote the new policies and practices encouraging consumption, the shift in supply to embrace food and non-food items, the change in spending habits and the increasing importance of demand – real or anticipated – in determining supply. Many date this consumer revolution some time around the early 1990s and, although this study will also argue that these years marked a watershed in terms of consumption behaviour, it also suggests that it was from the early 1980s that the rapid arrival of goods, the increase in demand, the sway of fashion and the new retail sites all encouraged shoppers to purchase new possessions, pursue new lifestyles and adopt new identities and thus become consumers both in attitude and practice. It can be argued that all these earlier city and suburban changes did themselves amount to a consumer revolution with all the qualities customarily attributed to that concept. Historians have argued that the profundity of the consumer revolution in Western Europe and America has only been recognised recently for it was often ignored or at least under-emphasised compared with the attention given to the industrial revolution. According to one such analyst, Colin Campbell, consumer revolution constituted a process comprising: new categories of goods, new times, places and patterns of purchase, new marketing techniques, new ideas about possessions and materialism, changes in reference groups and lifestyles, diffusion patterns, product symbolism, patterns of decision-making and the creation of demand. Campbell goes on to argue that the sum of these phenomena long passed unnoticed largely because of their gradual seeping nature over four centuries which contrasted with the speed of the industrial revolution.1 In China in the 1980s and continuing into the 1990s, it can be argued that the onset of the consumer revolution was so fast and so highly visible that it could not escape unnoticed and indeed it might be hypothesised that here the industrial and consumer revolutions were so collapsed into little more than one decade that it is a moot point which came fi rst.
