On a supermarket shelf, packaged in a little sachet costing a few pence, are the dreams of Chinese everywoman. The sachet contains not just shampoo but also the key to beauty, a better job, a more handsome husband and a brighter future. That may be a common enough advertising ploy, but it is a potent one in China where for decades femininity was deemed at odds with the revolution.
The woman today who buys a one-wash sachet is offering herself a touch of luxury and the cachet of a foreign brand at a price she can afford. To buy an entire bottle of shampoo, even a foreign brand manufactured inside China, can be too much of an investment for many in a country where the average disposable income of city dwellers is about £750 a year. But then, a decade or even as recently as five years ago, most Chinese women had the means to buy only a shampoo produced by a state enterprise that did not pretend to do more than offer clean hair. It didn’t try to promise conditioned, tangle-free, shining, silky locks — and thus a whole new life.
And that is just the start of what Chinese women want. Chinese women have never enjoyed such freedom to indulge their own fancies.
Fancies that will have an effect on all of us. There are 451 million Chinese women aged between 15-64, and 131 million aged under 15. This vast demographic is just beginning to enjoy consumer choice, but what Chinese women choose will eventually dominate what we buy in the West, so enormous will be their buying power. In the last century, America’s tastes shaped what we wanted, and what we bought. In this century, it will be China’s.
The glossy-haired young girl striding down a Beijing street in stiletto-heeled boots, tight jeans, a leather jacket and fake Burberry cashmere scarf seems a far cry from the communist stereotype of a crop-haired, stern-faced woman in a blue cotton Mao jacket and trousers or the 1930s wife smiling coyly in a tight-fitting silk cheongsam.
However, the 21st-century Chinese woman may still share very similar desires to her ancestors. Stop a woman on the street and she’s almost certain to say she wants a career. And, oh yes, by the way, of course, a husband. Pry a little deeper, and her answers show that a home and a family is where her heart lies. Nevertheless, the average city woman in China is exposed to choices of which her predecessors could never have dreamed. She can buy a house, drive her own car, pop out for a manicure, eat fresh fruit in winter, hold down a well-paid job and even choose her own husband.
And that can leave a Chinese woman baffled. Tom Doctoroff, head of J. Walter Thompson in China and author of a new book, Billions: Selling to the New Chinese Consumer, finds the Chinese woman to be a very confused creature. She faces a dizzying array of choices but is left to make them in a society still emerging from the chaos of the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution when make-up was banned as bourgeois and communist ideals of puritanism and political correctness remain entrenched. Doctoroff says: “All Chinese people are struggling between a very ambitious goal-oriented rigid social structure and the importance to conform to clearly defined social structures. There’s a need to advance without shattering the crystal palace. For women it’s even more of a challenge.”
In a 2000 survey, J. Walter Thompson found that 74 per cent of Chinese women strive for personal success. Asked to say what was more important to them, 53 per cent chose wealth and 19 per cent picked friendship.
Tina Huang (pictured on our cover), seems to have it all. Trained in a foreign bank in Beijing, married to a Cambridge-educated investment banker, the 34-year-old daughter of a diplomat has set up her own business, is slim, carefully groomed, well dressed and extremely pretty. But beneath her perfect skin beats the heart of a woman pulled in many different directions.
“My ambition is not to be a successful person. I don’t have a specific goal. I am a woman with many needs, who wants to be loved and to love.” Tina has relied on her own ability and determination to carve out a career in what is usually a man’s world. Her new business could hardly be more ambitious — she trades in oil products. And yet she insists her priority is her personal life rather than career success.
“On the outside I’m very soft, but I’m very clear in my heart and I think I’m quite strong,” she says. Her sentiments are not uncommon in a society where women for centuries were expected to be meek — until Chairman Mao famously declared that “women hold up half the sky” and made clear that he expected them to pull their weight.
In 21st-century China, expectations of women — and the expectations they have of themselves — have become so complicated that it would be hardly surprising to see a woman steelworker step out of a Maoist propaganda poster clutching a Chanel handbag in one hand and cradling a baby on her other arm.
“China boasts two mutually inconsistent female archetypes,” says Doctoroff. “Both are romanticised characterisations that, to this day, represent the essence of womanhood.” He describes these two women as the “loving and kind angel” and the “working warrior”.
“They are poles apart, so fulfilling both is, to say the least, a difficult proposition.”
Tina’s attitudes to life reflect that paradox. She would love to have a child. In the same breath she is delighted to describe the challenges of setting up her own company in a highly competitive sector, to recount her investment in a fast-food company and her hope one day to live on an inflow of dividends from her various ventures. She is very well-off, lives in an apartment block in one of Beijing’s smartest districts, and insists on paying for coffee. She is dressed in a fashionable tweed suit and high-heeled boots and bundles up against the winter cold in a cream cashmere coat. But shopping for designer clothing is now low on her list of priorities.
She has wider ambitions. “When I worked in the bank and had a high salary I would happily spend a weekend shopping for expensive clothes — I like Celine rather than Louis Vuitton. But now that I have my own business I need to be much more careful.”
It is an attitude common among China’s newly better-off women. Better to be fiscally prudent and to invest in a career or in a husband. It may be an approach to money that reflects decades when everyone lived in varying shades of poverty, from grinding in the case of peasants, workers and soldiers to genteel for government officials, academics and even senior Communist Party leaders.
Among the many who prefer to save than to spend is Cherry Xu. The daughter of poor farmers in central Hubei province, she left home at 15 because her parents could no longer afford to support her. She roamed China in search of work. Her journey began with a menial job in a hotel in the southern boom town of Shenzhen, on the border with Hong Kong, and she hated it. She wanted to go home and finish school. But her parents ordered her out after just three days, saying they could afford to pay for her elder brother alone. She found another hotel job in the northern port city of Tianjin but soon moved into sales. It was a skill that she used to move to Beijing — lured by the bright lights of the capital and the chance to see Tiananmen Square, where Chairman Mao declared the republic. “I was so young and ignorant when I left home that my greatest ambition was to earn £30 a month and to be able to send money back to my parents.”
Now 21, she earns ten times that amount selling property, is learning English and paying to put herself through school to gain a degree in business management. Cherry has clawed her way up the social ladder through grit and determination and says it is still far too soon to relax or to think of marriage. She gleefully points to each garment she is wearing: nothing cost more than £8. The time for extravagances will come later, if at all.
However the tall, slim young woman with trendy scarlet-rimmed rectangular spectacles does confess to allowing herself a couple of treats a year. Her hair is permed into gentle waves. But even that is so that she can present a well-groomed image at work. She buys her shampoo in those popular little sachets.
“I need to be able to move house quickly, to have the minimum of possessions. And you never know when times will get difficult so it’s important to economise. That’s how many people think in China.” But she knows that despite her current independence, marriage is inevitable. Her mother had insisted she return home at 23 and marry a local boy. But she has relented. Cherry is in no hurry. “It’s too tiring to be a housewife.” She would, however, like to please her parents by finding a husband in a city not too far from home. Some of her classmates are married already. The average age for marriage in China for women is only 23.
That is how old Yin Ying was when she married. The round-faced 26-year-old is typical of the 650 million women who hold up half of China’s sky and yearn to have a little money to buy more than food and basic clothes. She is the daughter of poor peasants, abandoned school to seek a better life in the city, and has toiled every day since she left home at 17 — in manual jobs, selling snacks, hawking cold drinks with her elder brother and now managing a streetside stall selling roast chestnuts in the heart of Beijing with her husband.
She stands every day in the biting winter cold, almost hidden under layers of padded clothing to sell her wares to passers-by from dawn until well after night falls. “My life is so much better than in the village. I have a little money to spend on myself.”
She dreams of one day moving out of her one-room home with no lavatory into a real home of her own. Even perhaps to own a car. She knows that day may be far off. Sooner, they may be able to afford to have a baby, who she will almost certainly hand over to her parents-in-law to care for while she earns the family living. Boy or girl, she says it doesn’t matter as long the child goes to university. “I regret that I have no education.”
Like most Chinese women, she is too poor and lacking in educationto reflect on what choices she wants to make in life. Yin Ying is just delighted that having a city job affords the choice at least to buy a new blouse every now and then. And like most Chinese women, she works. For that freedom she owes a debt to the feminists-turned-revolutionaries who took up the communist cause with Chairman Mao.
If women are torn between competing priorities, it is hardly surprising, says Liu Sola, a cult author and avant-garde musician whose work focuses on the position of women in Chinese society. Chinese women are caught between capitalism and communism, says Liu. They have been subjected to wrenching changes within a very short space of time. The women of Liu’s mother’s generation wanted to be feminists and fought their cause by joining Mao’s revolution. Liu, now 50, sees her own peers struggling to cope with the impact of economic reform, while the younger generation is even more confused.
“We didn’t choose the revolution, the revolution chose us. Women are so mixed up, between West and East, between socialist and capitalist. We want everything.”
Billions: Selling to the New Chinese Consumer by Tom Doctoroff, Palgrave Macmillan, £19.99. Available for £17:99 from Times Books First, 0870 1608080, www.timesonline.co.uk/booksbuyfirst
HOW ADVERTISERS PITCH TO CHINESE WOMEN
NIKE
Successful marketing balances aspirational individualism with conservatism. Nike produced an aerobics ad, which projected individual strength, albeit with a conformist pay-off. Adroitly posed women appear above the headlines: ‘If you can ‘maintain’ this ‘position’ in the gym, just think what you can do in the real world’.
THE DIAMOND TRADING COMPANY
The dream of ‘having it all’ is, obviously, a glorious-but-impossible balancing act. Yes, put the woman on top but never sacrifice charm. She must never emasculate her man (or colleagues) with uncouth directness or a table-banging iron fist. The Diamond Trading Company equates the jewel with clued-in savvy; however, an understated and feminine ‘sparkle’ also shines through.
UNILEVER’S HAZELINE SHAMPOO
Of course, romance is aspirational. But a truly successful union springs from and perpetuates a materially protected future, not a fluttering heart. So position your product as a demonstration that he would go anywhere or do anything for her. Unilever’s Hazeline ginseng shampoo enhances the beauty of long hair but, even more importantly, turns him into putty.
Tom Doctoroff, on advertising in China
