El Luxury and its discontents in contemporary China
Keywords:
luxury, consumption, wealth, ChinaAbstract
Based on ongoing fieldwork with a group of wealthy entrepreneurs who were formerly avid consumers of luxury brands, this paper examines emerging critiques of luxury consumption in urban China. I begin with an overview of the key roles luxury brands have played during the past two decades in signifying membership in exclusive social networks in China and mediating their associated gift economies. I then look at more recent changes brought on by several factors: anti-corruption campaigns, nationalist aversion to “foreign” luxury, the growing “commonness” of luxury brands in elite social circles, and increasing “inflation” in the gift economy. These factors have begun to undermine the previous meanings and functions of luxury, and to many wealthy Chinese, luxury brands now deliver something very different from the “global recognition” they once promised. The contradictions inherent in luxury consumption, I argue, are pushing members of China’s new rich towards more austere forms of status distinction including religious devotion and other traditional forms of spiritual and bodily self-cultivation.References
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