Annals of Chinese consumerism

An example of consumerism gone amuck. The Chinese are encouraging citizens to take up smoking to stimulate the economy...

In central China, officials have been ordered by the government to smoke approximately a quarter million packs of cigarettes in a year or else they might be slapped with fines. According to a news report on Monday, the staff of Gong'an county in Hubei province of central China are reportedly ordered by the authority to smoke 230,000 packs of local made cigarettes annually or else they will be fined. The newspaper, Global Times, has reported that this measure has been taken by the county in an attempt to promote the local brand such as Huanghelou, which are under severe pressure from competitors in neighboring Hunan province. 

Notably, China is the most smoke-filled country in this world and its 350 million smokers are just a thrid of the world’s total. Sixty per cent of all males over 15 and only 4 per cent of all women smoke regularly. Statistics says, every year 5 million people across the world die of smoking-related diseases and among them about 1.2 million people are Chinese.

Silver linings in a recession

From here: Recessions and depressions are brutal beasts that stalk the stragglers, especially retirees and the poor. There is too much inherent suffering during a recession to ever welcome it. But times of economic stress, it appears, can also be times of cultural renewal. "One reasonable hypothesis," argues James Q. Wilson, "is that the Depression pulled families together, and this cohesion inhibited crime." Many Americans who struggled through the Depression adopted a set of moral and economic habits such as thrift, family commitment, savings and modest consumption that lasted through their lifetimes -- and that have decayed in our own. The Depression generation controlled the things it could control -- including its own consumption and character.
We see hints of this type of reaction to our current recession, which has such clearly moral causes -- the burst of a bubble inflated by irresponsible debt, consumerism and unaccountable risk-taking. During an economic crisis, Americans return to a language of morality. Perhaps excess and recklessness are vices that deserve social stigma. Perhaps frugality and prudence are personal virtues as well as practices that prevent economic collapse. Perhaps there is a distinction between securing our needs and being dominated by our wants.

Reading

James Howard Kunstler talking to Ben McGrath about our incipient flimsiness and unapologetic cosumerism..

"Look at those stupid mangy little shutters and those horrible windows, and the horrible steel railings and those ridiculous pilasters. Everything about it is just so cheap. And the thing that amazes me is that this is the stuff that we built in the most confident and flush period of our history, in the sixties, when you know, we were basically ruling the world!" Further along, we came across a faux-Georgian bank, which he said was "basically fabricated out of the cheapest shit you could possibly get, stuck onto a brick box. Except that it is not even a brick box. It's an aluminum-frame box with a brick veneer, meant to visually get across a cartoon idea that this is a plantation house, and therefore a dignified building - you know with a dignified activity, banking, going on". 

From his blog: The attempt to restart "consumerism" will be equally disappointing. It was a manifestation of the short peak energy decades of history, and now that we're past peak energy, it's over. That seventy percent of the economy is over, especially the part that allowed people to buy stuff with no money. From now on people will have to buy stuff with money they earn and save, and they will be buying a lot less stuff. For a while, a lot of stuff will circulate through the yard sales and Craigslist, and some resourceful people will get busy fixing broken stuff that still has value. But the other infrastructure of shopping is toast, especially the malls, the strip malls, the real estate investment trusts that own it all, many of the banks that lent money to the REITs, the chain-stores and chain eateries, of course, and, alas, the non-chain mom-and-pop boutiques in these highway-oriented venues.

Fritz Scholder, Purgatory, 1996, Acrylic, oil and collage on canvas, Collection of the estate of Fritz Scholder.