Catch the BBC Radio 5 Live interview in which I discuss the various interests involved in this convoluted embrace. The interview begins at the 03:16:48 point in the show.

She looked different to me, though I couldn’t quite decide how. I saw her frequently enough, serving Starbucks at one of the chain’s establishments in Suzhou, and always found bantering with her fun. The twenty-one year old student had a very slight build and from behind and at a distance could be unpardonably confused for a 13-year old boy. Her long ponytail, however, was a clear exclamation mark of her sexuality.

Then she batted her eyelashes at me.

Oh, I realized, that’s what it is that’s different. False eyelashes.

Fake eyelashes seemed to have fluttered into the fashion scene in a big way here in China about a year ago. They’ve apparently been popular throughout East Asia for years, starting with young Japanese girls. Slight women with slight features suddenly were able to bat eyelashes that were large enough to fan a pharaoh cool.

In the West, false eyelashes are a sign of – well – fake. Something a woman wears for fun: to a party, to a disco. But not to work. Still, in the Chinese woman’s exploration of her sexuality and how the rest of the world has been interpreting femininity since World War II, fake eye lashes are the height of fashion for twenty-somethings that have few – how to delicately put it? – distinctive attributes.

The Wall Street Journal recently wrote: “Ironically, despite high levels of short-sightedness, a new trend is catching on across China: young hipsters who opt to wear empty plastic eyeglass frames as a fashion statement. That way, their fake eyelashes can stick out unimpeded, and they avoid having to peer through glass lens that fog up when walking outside on hot, humid days.

Technorati Tags: bill dodson, lifestyle

Technorati Tags: bill dodson, consumer behavior, personal care

Michael Dunne, president of Dunne & Company, a Hong Kong-based consultancy specializing in Asian car markets, wrote a nice piece in the Wall Street Journal recently about the explosive growth in the luxury SUV automotive sector. He writes:

Chinese consumers will buy an estimated 310,000 luxury SUVs this year — spending, on average, more than $80,000 a pop — according to forecasting group LMC Automotive.

Before going any further, let’s do the math on that: The cash that Chinese will spend on luxury SUVs this year alone is enough buy all 20,000 homes currently for sale in Detroit (median price; $94,000) and still have $22 billion dollars left over.

In 2011 J.D. Power and Associates conducted research that revealed that more than 90% of luxury SUV purchases are settled in cash.

Conspicuous consumption is playing a greater driver in the motivations of the nouveau riche, as they want to announce their status to the world. Dunne writes:

“When we buy a luxury car, we’re telling the world that we’re rich,“ Cai explains. “But with a luxury SUV, we’re saying look at me: I’m rich – and different and powerful. I drove a friend’s Mercedes M Class recently and I could feel the people looking at me.”

Mercedes, especially, has benefited from the high-end market. The company sold 848 SUVs in China in 2005; in 2011 they sold 54, 016, nearly double what they sold the year before.

European brands overwhelm the segment with two out of three SUVs sold in China made by Audi, BMW, Porsche and Mercedes. Cadillac, Lincoln, Infiniti and Lexus are working over-time to cash in on some of the largesse of the new class.

Read more: WSJ

Technorati Tags: automotive, bill dodson, branding, china, consumer behavior, lifestyle, luxury

Chinese web sites and television reports have of late been relentless about how yogurt in China is really made by domestic producers. A Chinese associate named Marie told me she was concerned about the health of her son, who is in middle school, and who loves to eat yogurt.

Coincidentally – or not, given the amount of media coverage on the topic – my (Chinese) wife had just called me a couple hours before to tell me she had been talking with a neighbor that very same afternoon about yogurt made in China.

The locals are getting restless, and are boycotting purchases of the runny stuff in favor of making it themselves. Yogurt-making machines are cheap – anywhwere from 60 rmb to 90 rmb. Most of the neighbors make yogurt themselves for their children to eat.

Apparently, the real turn-off is the shoes yogurt makers are putting into their product. It took me a few days to get to the bottom of why shoes were a valuable ingredient, though. It seems the adhesive used in pasting soles together makes for a great yogurt coagulant.

After all, who actually likes eating runny yogurt? (I don’t, for one). Though I understand yogurt drinks are quite popular. (I am unclear whether yogurt drinks have the same sole as container yogurt).

Yogurt in China has been a relatively protected industry since the meltdown of the dairy sector in 2008. Then, producers were spiking dairy products with a close cousin of plastic, melanine. The scandal cost the lives of more than a dozen children and sickened hundreds throughout the country, and several government officials and executives charged with ensuring food safety.

Though sterilized milk products from France, Germany and Australia haven been available on shelves, no fresh alternatives have been available save a South Korean product. Fresh South Korean milk, however, has only become available again since last autumn in the region.

Yogurt imports do not appear on local grocery shelves. Consumers may be fortunate to find them in foreign shops that specialize in imports. Buyers though, pay a premium for the privilege. Still, with the prospect of eating local yogurts containing the old soles of Chinese shoes, the price may be worth it.

Or, Westerners in China can do what my family did: purchase a yogurt maker and Do-IT-Yourself.

image: beijingshots.com

Technorati Tags: bill dodson, food & beverage

On a recent week-long business trip to Shenzhen I was shocked to find there were no more prostitutes hovering around the hotels. At least, there were none at the Marco Polo hotel at which I stayed, about a ten minute drive from the architecturally mind-bending city hall. The last time I had stayed at a hotel in Shenzhen, about five years ago, prostitutes literally lined up outside the main entrance of the hotel, and swarmed the open lobby. I recall being on the phone once in the lobby lounge when a young woman with heavy make-up sat across from me.

“I’m on the phone,” I told her, knowing her intentions, “go away.”

“It’s ok,” she said, and fingered her mobile phone. She composed herself to wait patiently for me to finish my conversation. “I’ll wait.”

After I finished my phone conversation I had to be quite rude to make her go away.

Later, she and one of her compatriots literally cornered my client – a tall, middle-aged American man – on the mezzanine level of the hotel as he was walking toward the elevators. One pinched him on the butt. He turned around to see his assailant. He backed into the elevator, believing the doors had slid open. They hadn’t yet. He put up his hands as if to surrender to the young women, to buy him some time. The doors finally opened, and he stepped in. Without escort.

As the city’s wealth has developed city leaders have been trying to upgrade the town’s image from grimy factory site to upscale metropolitan. Two years ago the city was the site of a controversial move to cleanse the city’s image. Young girls who plied the trade were lined up in queues of shame and paraded through the streets. For the most part the internet community was against the humiliation.

The governor of Guangdong province has also been actively promoting the region’s two largest cities – Guangzhou and Shenzhen – as services outsourcing platforms. Services not only generates a higher tax base, but also demands a more sophisticated kind of employee – and customer. Truly, my encounters with the prostitutes a few years back were certainly off-putting, and slightly embarrassing for me and the client.

I’m sure Shenzhen still has a going concern in the “oldest occupation in the world” in other parts of the city; however, the area in which I stayed for the week was fun and refreshing: malls, outdoor cafes, bars and shops were inviting and relaxing. Not a bad setting after a long day’s work.

Technorati Tags: bill dodson, lifestyle

Friends in Shanghai last week asked me what I was going to be doing during the May holiday. “Ride the subway!” I answered brightly.

The first line of Suzhou’s subway opened this weekend to much fanfare. Speeches, huge helium balloons tethered to the ground, and fireworks displays all marked the occassion. The event put me in mind of the first train on the transcontinental railroad in America a hundred fifty years ago making stops at frontier towns. Everyone came out then to greet the newfangled contraptions. Suzhou citizens were no different.

The line is the first of five total that will lace the city. Apparently, after all five lines of the subway are completed in Suzhou – sometime in the next five or six years – the underground will connect with Shanghai’s own, creating a mass transit web between the cities by 2020.

My family and I thought that by waiting a day after the official launch the crowds would be thinner than on opening day. They weren’t. Worse, many of the local residents had little experience on subways, so getting through the electronic gates and from the platforms was torturous. Locals had no experience swiping their cards on the kiosks or feeding the machines the passes. Lines were also long at the electronic kiosks where passengers had to buy the subway passes. Two or three clerks at a time had to help people select destinations on the computer displays and inject their cash to retrieve the travel cards.

The couple stations we were at seemed not to have enough ticket machines. The trains themselves took about 60- to 70-percent the capacity of Shanghai underground cars; the platforms were narrower than Shanghai’s, as well. No matter the time of day on the Sunday during which we rode the train downtown and then back again to the Suzhou Industrial Park space in the cars and on the platforms was standing room only. The space constraints will likely make for many a grim rush hour.

The public center of Suzhou – Guan Qian Jie – a mile-long walking street bordered with shops, restaurants and and local retail outlets – was bustling. Restaurants were full and lines were long. From McDonalds to the noodle shop chains like Kang Shifu, consumers were munching their way to relaxation in the spring sunshine.

Nevertheless, there was a palpable sense of excitement in the air in and around the stations. Now, Suzhou had something mostly the largest cities in China had: an underground. As my wife gleefully said while we waited on the subway platform for the next train, “Suzhou isn’t just a little town anymore!”.

“The problem,” my friend told me, “is the Chinese with money read the label and see ‘Made in China’. If they’ve already bought one of our products, they return it; if they haven’t bought it yet, they return it to the shelf.

“They simply don’t trust the quality of products made in China, and don’t understand how something made in China could be so expensive.” My friend went on to tell me that despite the designs being cutting edge and the highest quality fabrics used in clothing lines and the best materials in their appliances, the company is struggling to reach the sort of tipping point in purchases amongst China’s nouveau riche as they have in other Asian countries.

As I write in my upcoming book (Wiley & Sons, due out early summer 2012), “China Fast Forward: A Blueprint of the Technologies, Green Industries and Innovations Driving China’s Future”, Brand China has come to be associated in international markets with cheap, chintzy and unaccountable. Apparently, the Chinese think so, too.

I write in “China Fast Forward” how the most successful Chinese companies seeking their fortune in overseas markets actually remake their Made In China image into something Western, international-sounding, and bland; that is, innocuous. Others want to associate themselves with a strong Western national-brand image.

The Financial Times recently published an article about the growing haute couture business in China. Now, some high end domestic products aspiring brand-hood are designing clothes in Shanghai and having them manufactured in Italy. Just so they can have attached to them the Made in Italy label, with all the sense of style and attention to detail the image entails.

Of course, we don’t know where in Italy these wares are manufactured. An Italian neighbor of mine in China told me there are villages in Italy whose economies have been based for centuries in textile manufacture. “Now,” she told me, “there are more Chinese than locals in many of these villages.”

National brands in these days of global supply chains just aren’t what they used to be.

Technorati Tags: china, globalization, haute couture, made in china

I’ve just returned from week on business to India. I gained several deeply etched impressions:

1. I was absolutely ecstatic to return to China. Relatively speaking, it was clean, orderly and safe. It was nice being home.

2. India is full of a dizzying array of economic opportunities and will continue to have so for a long time to come, mostly because of government gerrymandering and malfeasance.

3. I have never met so many pleasant, intelligent and imaginative people as in India.

4. The Indian government’s lack of will in bringing even the rudiments of sanitation, infrastructure and utilities to its people after all this time is criminal, given the energy and initiative of its people.

6. Any competition the media promotes between the economic development of China and India is bogus. There is not and never will be competition until the Indian government truly shows its concern for its citizens by building basic infrastructure for ALL to access, no matter the socioeconomic level.

7. Despite transgressions against human rights and corruption on a systemic scale in China, at least things have gotten done and the quality of life for most of the country’s citizens is far beyond what it was twenty years ago. Now when I encounter a frustration in China, I mutter to myself, “At least it’s getting done”.

I look forward one day to saying as much about India.

Technorati Tags: economic trends, social trends