中国游客：我们真是受够了
A vote of no confidence from China’s young consumers（713words）

by Patti Waldmeir in Shanghai,March 16, 2015 12:31 pm

When money is no longer enough, what does communism have to offer?

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Springtime is the season for predicting the imminent demise of the Communist party of China. It’s like pollen: just as spring brings allergens, so it brings China’s annual parliamentary sessions. And the west is so allergic to that display of putative parliamentarianism that some pundit always ends up predicting it will all end in tears.Authoritarianism with Chinese characteristics cannot endure, we are told; the endgame has begun.

Normally, being not much given to apocryphal prognostications of that sort, I just hold my breath and wait for the pollen, and the pundits, to go away. I would do that this year too, but for one small and seemingly insignificant fact highlighted by Premier Li Keqiang near the start of the weeklong meetings of top lawmakers and political advisers: the sheer volume of lavatory seats and rice cookers purchased by Chinese tourists to Japan during the just-ended lunar New Year holiday.

Premier Li was referring to Japanese television reports, widely circulated in China, that mainland tourists spent nearly $1bn in Japan over the holidays — and much of it went on the aforementioned sanitary ware and kitchen utensils.

Now, most Chinese toilets already have quite serviceable covers, and most homes have a rice cooker, so why the sudden exodus of tourists bent on procuring items that can easily be had at home? And why buy them from a country that has been routinely demonised for the past two years by Beijing and vilified in mainland television programming?

Most everyone from Mr Li to Yuan Yafei, the Chinese entrepreneur whose Sanpower conglomerate recently bought the UK’s House of Fraser, is pretty clear about what explains the toilet seat treachery. Mr Yuan says its costs five to six times as much to buy things in a shop in China as overseas or online. And Mr Li made clear there was only one solution: trade barriers to keep out enemy loos? No: better homemade loo seats. He told members of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference that domestic companies should make products that consumers want to buy at home, and “save them the price of a plane ticket”.

Talk about a vote of no-confidence: who would lug around domestic unmentionables such as that on holiday, unless they were truly fed up with shopping in their own country? Mainlanders don’t have many rights, but surely they are entitled to have their lavatorial needs met at home? To add insult to injury, one proud owner of a new Japanese loo-lounger found that it had actually been made in China — but only for export.

Still, under 10 per cent of mainland New Year travellers went to Japan, with or without designs on bathroom accessories, so what about the rest of the 5m-plus outbound travellers? Many of them did the usual — gorge on duty-free shopping — but some engaged in activities that were, if anything, even more worrying for the party in the long run than voting with their feet for Japanese loos. They voted with their feet for a post-consumer society.

My two teens and I spent the holiday caravanning around New Zealand, certain that we’d have to share the blue sky and fresh air with many other mainlanders — but that few would join us at backcountry campsites.

Wrong again: the lingua franca of most New Zealand camper van sites we hit appeared to be Shanghainese, and the scents in the kitchens were soya sauce and sesame oil. I expected ageing Antipodean hippies in VW combi vans, but instead I found youthful mainlanders roughing it just for fun — which would surely make no sense to their grannies, their parents or, for that matter, Mr Li. For some young Chinese, holidays are no longer just about spending money, and that’s bad news for the premier. Because, when money is not enough, what has communism to offer? That thought is scarier than any invasion of enemy ablution aids.

This may all just be pollen in the wind: by next year’s spring political season, it will all have blown over. But I won’t be shorting Japanese toilet stocks or Kiwi camper van shares any time soon. Something’s rotten in the state of Chinese consumerism. Beijing might want to work on that before the next pollen season.