Sense and Sensibility

Chinese Take the High Road to Whiskey

 I’m so happy about the Chinese buying Hummer.

Maybe McDonald’s will be next.

Too bad they passed on Linens ‘n Things. What a cultural coup that would have been [Dash] His and hers towels in organic bamboo.

I’m already feeling the Chinese Tiger blowing hot against the back of my neck.

But I’m not sure all this off-loading to China is all bad. After all, how smart could a country be when the first item on their shopping list is Hummer?

Yet Hummers are surprisingly popular in China, where sales of SUVs have jumped more than 43 percent over last year. Well, somebody’s got to buy those leviathans and we’re running out of 98-pound suburban mothers to skipper them.

China, where the richest 10 percent of the population controls 45 percent of the country’s wealth, is feeling its oats. As its per capita income soars and its percentage of nouveau riche swells, China is beginning to show all the signs of a disease that first incubated in the U.S.: Affluenza, defined by author John deGraaf as “a painful, contagious, socially-transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more.”

Perhaps you know someone who’s had a bout or two.

We all know the symptoms of affluenza [Dash] the $21,000 per year spent on consumer goods, the flat-screen TVs in the bathroom, the DVD players in the back seat, the home additions the size of a strip mall, the $9,000 in credit card debt. Oh, the thrill of it all. Just thinking about how much money I could spend without having any gets me teary-eyed with nostalgia.

I wonder how the Chinese will take to it.

China, a country that has lurched from reinvention to reinvention, has become so acquisitive that entrepreneurs have inaugurated foreclosure tours to the U.S., National Public Radio reports. Chinese bargain hunters are scouring our foreclosed real estate like bridal parties at Loehmann’s. When of one of these Chinese tour agencies advertised for 40 spots, it was inundated with 400 applications. No, the Chinese are not trying to take advantage of our mortgage rates; NPR reports that, in most cases, they just pay cash.

How could the Chinese have so much dough?

Simple. They’re cheaper than your grandparents.

The personal savings rate in China is about 30 percent of household income, compared with a U.S. rate that is 3.6 percent. In the U.S., where credit card card indebtedness tripled in the 1990s, our personal savings rate fell from about 10 percent of our income in 1980 to 0.5 in 2005. It has since inched, like our anxiety, upwards.

The Chinese have become so thirsty for Western style decadence; they’re beginning to suck up all the whiskey in Scotland. The Chicago Tribune reports that Chinese imports of Scotch whisky have skyrocketed from $2.9 million in 2001 to more than $90 million in 2005.

As you might imagine, these Dionysian pleasures are rewriting the social dynamic of China. Chinese children, already an indulged lot by virtue of the country’s one-child-per-family policy, are spending like Ruth Madoff in the port of St. Thomas. Within the byways of Shanghai’s finest neighborhoods, annual per capita consumption of Chinese children reached $1,565 [Dash] this in a city where each resident’s disposable income is a mere $2,309.22

According to the English-language People’s Daily, in nearly 80 percent of working-class three-member households, the monthly consumption of the child is even greater than the adults.

When kids are spending more than their parents, China begins to look more and more like us. I’m holding on to my Apple Dippers. In this race, he with the last Happy Meal wins.

Reach me at TraceyOSh@tracey.com