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Urban Consumer Culture, The China Quarterly

Excerpts: Over the past decade, urban residents have experienced a consumer revolution at multiple levels. In terms of material standard of living, sustained economic growth has dramatically increased spending on discretionary consumer purchases and urbanites have enthusiastically consumed globally branded foodstuffs, pop-music videos and fashion. At the same time, however, income distribution has become increasingly unequal. Some scholars therefore emphasize the negative exclusionary and exploitative parameters of the new consumer culture seeing nothing more than a ruse of capitalism (...). Building on nearly a decade of fieldwork in Shanghai, this article disputes such a linear interpretation (...).