If globalization offered employment opportunities—albeit in often wretched conditions—to some people in the developing countries, it also promoted a worldwide culture of consumerism. That culture placed the accumulation of material goods, many of them of Western origin, above older values of spiritual attainment or social responsibility. Nowhere has this culture of consumerism been more prominent than in China, where the fading of Maoist communism, the country’s massive economic growth, and its new openness to the wider world combined to generate an unabashed materialism in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. A popular slogan suggested that life in modern China required the “eight bigs”: color TV, refrigerator, stereo, camera, motorcycle, a suite of furniture, washing machine, and an electric fan. Visual Source 23.2 illustrates this culture of consumerism as well as one of the “eight bigs” in a poster from the post-Mao era. The poster depicting China after communism provides further illustration of Chinese consumerism.
In what ways might these images be used to illustrate Westernization, modernization, globalization, and consumerism?
How might the young people on the motorcycle understand their own behavior? Do you think they are conscious of behaving in Western ways or have these ways become Chinese? What is the significance of a Chinese couple riding a Suzuki motorcycle, a Japanese product probably manufactured in China under a license agreement?
Beyond consumerism, how does this poster reflect changes in relationships between men and women in China after Mao? Is this yet another face of globalization or does it remain a distinctly Western phenomenon?
How might these images be read as a celebration of Chinese success? How might they be used to criticize contemporary Chinese society?