Consumer Culture in China

I am applying to the AHRC Research Fellowship scheme for the 2010-11 academic year to allow me to complete a book project, Consumer Culture in China, which is under advance contract from Cambridge University Press. This book will examine the history of consumerism in China across the entire twentieth-century and draw on archival and bibliographic materials that I have collected in the USA, UK, and China over the past four years.

Consumer Culture in China will be a major archivally-based study which will examine China's history of consumerism across the entire twentieth-century, looking at the ways in which its involvement, disengagement, and re-engagement with global capitalism has shaped everyday life. This is a major historical topic, but also one with obvious present-day relevance, as the development of the Chinese consumer market has been one of the most dramatic features of the last twenty years of global history. My book will, however, be primarily historical in approach and will be composed of three parts. The first third will examine the pre-history and foundations of consumerism in China before 1949; the second third will explore how and why the Communists attempted to un-do nascent consumerism after their victory in 1949, arguing that the new regime radically re-shaped but never eliminated consumerism from Chinese life; and the final third of the book will trace the return of full-scale consumerism and demonstrate the interconnectedness of key changes in urban life from the start of the Reform Era in 1978 to the present. In particular, it will focus on the crucial but understudied early years of the reform era in the 1980s, when the Chinese economy made the decisive transition towards an economy of consumption rather than one of production.

This book will draw on extensive original research. Over my first two years at Oxford, thanks to support from the University of Oxford Fell Fund, the British Academy, the History Faculty, and Merton College, I have made three lengthy visits to China, where I have gathered research materials and established important research ties to academics and institutions in China, ensuring that the project will incorporate the latest scholarship from China, Europe, and the USA. In the winter of 2008-2009, for instance, I delivered addresses (in Chinese) at two academic conferences. More importantly, my first book has been translated into Chinese, published by one of the best academic presses there, and been widely (and positively) reviewed. These Chinese academic contacts have helped me track down and gain access to otherwise unavailable or overlooked archival materials, books, and articles. In particular, my book will be based on research in the Shanghai Municipal Archives, the Suzhou Municipal Archives, and the Number Two Historical Archives in Nanjing and will contain material on everything from the sources of anti-imperialist boycotts of the early twentieth-century to the new hierarchies of consumption created by the rationing system introduced by the Communists in the 1950s to the policies restraining consumption by new entrepreneurs during the early reform era of the 1980s. Virtually none of these materials have been used in any English-language or indeed Chinese-language publication.

My research on the history of modern consumerism has many immediate and obvious implications. It will be of interest to non-academics in business and journalism and could help them come to a different understanding of contemporary China. They will appreciate the relative newness of capitalist markets in China--their origins, evolution, and, most importantly, their fragility. My research demonstrate how far from relying on the 'deregulation' of markets, as popular accounts describe the changes in China, contemporary Chinese capitalism relies very heavily on massive government intervention in markets-- from the decision to destroy mixed centres of cities to create Central Business Districts to the decision in the mid-1990s to build a globally competitive (and highly subsidized) automotive industry to China's difficulty protecting Intellectual Property Rights (IPR)--all of forms of all of these issues are a direct outgrowth of earlier political decisions in China. China, for instance, would not have become the world's largest car market in 2009 without massive political and financial support from the state in many ways, including the building of roads, the facilitating of joint-ventures between Chinese and foreign automotive companies, and the relaxation of credit markets, allowing more Chinese consumers to borrow to buy cars. An appreciation of such decisions behind China's shift from an economic model focused on production to one build on consumption will allow journalists and political and business leaders to appreciate why they may wish to be sceptical of China's compliance with its WTO obligations. Of course, I do not expect busy policy-makers and businesspeople to necessarily read my research. But, as with basic research in any field, the results will gradually re-shape the information that does reach them.