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DaVinci scandal exposes tacky Chinese nouveau tastes
By Lena Zhang |
July 26, 2011, Tuesday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
DAVINCI Furniture has recently come under fire for a series of misdeeds including false advertising, sub-standard production, and shipping domestically manufactured items to the Waigaoqiao Free Trade Zone then "importing" them as overseas products.
Some furniture was sold for 10 times its actual worth, simply because it had gone through the "importation" process. Gone are the "Made in China" labels, and "top-of-the-world" brands are born.
But why had so many high-end Chinese buyers fallen easy prey to one of the most outrageous quasi-scams in more than a decade?
One thing is pretty clear: DaVinci has provided a splendid platform for a section of the newly rich of China in their anxious attempts to distance themselves from the rest of the population.
One of the first catch-phrases I heard since my recent return to China is "Buy only what's expensive." In a nation overwhelmed by materialism, the newly rich in particular have trouble resisting the urge to flaunt their wealth. Expensive furniture has quickly joined a most special family of Veblen goods - with a seemingly uncapped positive price elasticity of demand. [Veblen goods are those which become more desirable as their price increases; their value does not obey the law of supply and demand.]
At the same time, many are rather angst-ridden about their humble backgrounds. They are eager to climb up the social ladder by accumulating what they have mistaken for status symbols of a class they aspire to.
After they manage to distinguish themselves from the poor and middle-income bunch through expensive purchases, there has risen the need to further set themselves apart from other "lower-class" newly rich by expensive purchases that carry foreign luxury labels that they barely know anything about.
In one of DaVinci's promotions, their so-called top-end classic European home furniture was said to be endorsed by the highest echelons of Europe and accessible only to the elite and the most successful.
Such a far-fetched sales pitch probably struck a vulnerable chord in the deep-pocketed, foreign-worshipping crowd and completely numbed their already-limited ability to sort out the foreign gold from the garbage, especially in matters involving personal taste and artistic flair.
Kate Fox, a social anthropologist and a best-selling author, has written about the class rules in English home furnishing, after years of thorough research in the UK and supplementary comparisons in other Western cultures.
As the English rules are somewhat representative of the class system in the West, her insightful and witty notes may help shed some badly needed light for those Chinese newly rich who oversimpify matters by equating price with quality and class.
Height of vulgarity
She observed that upper-class and upper-middle-class homes tend to be shabby, frayed and unkempt in a way no middle-middle or lower-middle class family would tolerate, and the homes of the wealthiest, working-class nouveaux riches are full of extremely expensive items that the uppers and upper-middles regard as the height of vulgarity.
In addition, the upper echelons, proud of their eclectic antiques, sneer at matching "suites", while the lower echelons, ashamed of their ill-assorted cast-offs, aspire to them.
In fact an English person's social class can be gauged immediately from his/her attitude to expensive brand-new furniture - the middle-middle or below would think it's "posh", whereas the upper-middle or above would think it's "naff".
I won't venture to discuss if it's right or wrong for the Chinese to follow Western examples, however, I hope the more vain and more ignorant group of the newly rich of China would at least have a serious think about Ms Fox's findings, lest they be made a laughing stock in the high societies of the established economies they often wished they were also a member of.
After all, fortune may fall overnight but class takes generations to cultivate.
(The author currently lives in Shanghai.)
Some furniture was sold for 10 times its actual worth, simply because it had gone through the "importation" process. Gone are the "Made in China" labels, and "top-of-the-world" brands are born.
But why had so many high-end Chinese buyers fallen easy prey to one of the most outrageous quasi-scams in more than a decade?
One thing is pretty clear: DaVinci has provided a splendid platform for a section of the newly rich of China in their anxious attempts to distance themselves from the rest of the population.
One of the first catch-phrases I heard since my recent return to China is "Buy only what's expensive." In a nation overwhelmed by materialism, the newly rich in particular have trouble resisting the urge to flaunt their wealth. Expensive furniture has quickly joined a most special family of Veblen goods - with a seemingly uncapped positive price elasticity of demand. [Veblen goods are those which become more desirable as their price increases; their value does not obey the law of supply and demand.]
At the same time, many are rather angst-ridden about their humble backgrounds. They are eager to climb up the social ladder by accumulating what they have mistaken for status symbols of a class they aspire to.
After they manage to distinguish themselves from the poor and middle-income bunch through expensive purchases, there has risen the need to further set themselves apart from other "lower-class" newly rich by expensive purchases that carry foreign luxury labels that they barely know anything about.
In one of DaVinci's promotions, their so-called top-end classic European home furniture was said to be endorsed by the highest echelons of Europe and accessible only to the elite and the most successful.
Such a far-fetched sales pitch probably struck a vulnerable chord in the deep-pocketed, foreign-worshipping crowd and completely numbed their already-limited ability to sort out the foreign gold from the garbage, especially in matters involving personal taste and artistic flair.
Kate Fox, a social anthropologist and a best-selling author, has written about the class rules in English home furnishing, after years of thorough research in the UK and supplementary comparisons in other Western cultures.
As the English rules are somewhat representative of the class system in the West, her insightful and witty notes may help shed some badly needed light for those Chinese newly rich who oversimpify matters by equating price with quality and class.
Height of vulgarity
She observed that upper-class and upper-middle-class homes tend to be shabby, frayed and unkempt in a way no middle-middle or lower-middle class family would tolerate, and the homes of the wealthiest, working-class nouveaux riches are full of extremely expensive items that the uppers and upper-middles regard as the height of vulgarity.
In addition, the upper echelons, proud of their eclectic antiques, sneer at matching "suites", while the lower echelons, ashamed of their ill-assorted cast-offs, aspire to them.
In fact an English person's social class can be gauged immediately from his/her attitude to expensive brand-new furniture - the middle-middle or below would think it's "posh", whereas the upper-middle or above would think it's "naff".
I won't venture to discuss if it's right or wrong for the Chinese to follow Western examples, however, I hope the more vain and more ignorant group of the newly rich of China would at least have a serious think about Ms Fox's findings, lest they be made a laughing stock in the high societies of the established economies they often wished they were also a member of.
After all, fortune may fall overnight but class takes generations to cultivate.
(The author currently lives in Shanghai.)
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