On the final evening of a trip to China this summer, I went out to dinner with friends at a shopping mall in central Shanghai and had my eyes opened by something unexpected.
Shopping malls have been the rage in China for decades, never falling out of fashion as some would say they did long ago in the country that invented them, the United States. Although a definitive count is hard to come by, in Shanghai alone, China’s largest city and one of its richest, there are said to be hundreds of malls, and I’ve been visiting them frequently since the early 2000s, when I lived in the city.
This might make malls an unlikely backdrop for an insight into ongoing social currents in the country, but that’s exactly what my dinner experience delivered to me on this night. First of all was the location. When I received the invitation, I immediately recognized the address, Middle Huaihai Road, in the city’s elegant former French Concession. And as I approached the place in a car hailed using an Uber-like app, I remembered the neighborhood as having once been home to one of the city’s biggest and most famous fake-goods markets. For decades, this was where airline crews and foreign visitors flocked to purchase knockoffs of Western luxury brands at rock-bottom prices, as well as pirated copies of DVDs of the latest Hollywood releases, among other goods.
Upon approach, the mall announced just how much China—and the world—has changed in the last 10 years, through the gigantic, illuminated lettering of its anchor business: an enormous Prada store, replete with the ritzy and distinctive architecture that normally goes with such things. Other pricey brand stores included Gucci, Miu Miu, and Dolce & Gabbana.
Even before I stepped inside, I knew that I was in for a special experience. Neatly dressed valets and doormen greeted arriving customers pointing them, a bit superfluously, toward the automatic doorways, where even from the outside, the welcome blast of air conditioning could be felt in the warm and thickly humid night.
I have long been aware that Chinese shopping malls, like malls in other countries, exist on a spectrum, from low to high end, and I had been to other high-end malls in China before, including in other cities, from Beijing to Chengdu and Xi’an. The celebration of luxury on display at the IAPM Mall struck me as a whole new level, though, and this went well beyond its collection of commercial tenants. What impressed me more that evening was the clientele. No small number of the people sauntering through its white decor looked like customers in a Paris or Milan fashion show, and, often enough, like the models themselves, complete with looks of haughty self-contentment and practiced ennui.
One of the most prevalent storylines about China in the wake of COVID-19 has been the dearth of consumer demand. This was clearly not the problem, though, for the occupants of the small world that I encountered that evening. There have been related storylines about weak investment data, both from Chinese and foreign sources, as well as an even longer-running topic, an ongoing crisis over overcapacity in the housing market.
I am admittedly limited to appearances, but on this one Friday night the people in this one mall didn’t seem to have a care in the world. Not only were they dressed to kill, but they were filling the many shops and restaurants, where they were eating fancy meals and, yes, spending money and buying things. My visits to more ordinary malls on this trip and other recent visits have revealed very different behaviors to me. The foot traffic in them appears reasonably healthy, even busy, but the stores, from jewelry shops and mobile phone dealers to clothing boutiques, have most often been empty, or close to it, and the food consumption on display heavily favored low-end restaurants and fast food.
The point that I have been working my way toward is that more than ever before, this trip left me with the impression of China as a deeply and increasingly bifurcated society, one in which inequality is high and seems to be growing, where people are living in increasingly separate worlds.
As I noted in my last column, which also drew from this trip, large numbers of Chinese people have recently been seeking ways to exit their society, pessimistically voting with their feet, in effect, about their country’s prospects after a long period of world-beating and transformational economic growth. The question is whether this matters to the country’s leadership, or better put: At what point would an exodus of people be deemed a crisis or emergency?
There is an argument to be made that the flight of many thousands of people who are struggling in China’s current economic environment actually benefits the state, by serving as a form of social release or, in other words, an escape valve. People from the countryside, from third-tier cities in the country’s interior, members of the working and lower-middle classes enjoy little political influence in today’s China. What the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and state pay much closer attention to are the sentiments and behaviors of the more prosperous elements of the society that are concentrated in the giant and relatively rich cities of the country’s east.
If religion, for Karl Marx, was famously called the opium of the masses, then material comfort; dernier cri fashion; access to the most prestigious brands; and lifestyle enhancements, like the endless fancy dining choices on display in the mall I visited, from the sumptuous and elegant Singapore soup dumpling restaurant where we ate to the embarrassment of choices of specialty dessert places (I chose chocolates from an expensive Italian-named place), would seem to be the pacifiers of China’s upper-middle classes.
By the standards of Americans with decent professional incomes, the cost of living in China’s most affluent cities often seems quite reasonable. Foreign luxury goods may be expensive (and heavily taxed), but restaurants, clothes, transportation, and many services are downright cheap. If this is true for an American, it is also true for an affluent Chinese person, like those in evidence on this Friday night.
For me, this helps make sense of a lot of what is going on in China today. Scholars have long explained the post-Tiananmen Square social contract in these terms: Stay out of politics, the sole preserve of the CCP, and focus on that era’s newly sanctified secular goal, getting rich.
Becoming affluent has become much more difficult in recent years, with the Chinese economy’s gradual but steady slowdown, with a trend toward rapid aging well underway, and with the costs of the COVID-19 pandemic and its sluggish aftermath. Brought up to date, a newer disposition might go something like this: If you’re rich, good for you; enjoy, indulge, and don’t make waves. If you’re not, though, well, you’re largely on your own.
When one looks at the rest of the Chinese population—meaning the hundreds of millions who don’t live in the most prosperous eastern cities, don’t rank above the middle class, or worse, live in the countryside—the material comforts and purchasing-power advantages enjoyed by urban elites are shrinking or nonexistent. For many rural Chinese, the most economically vulnerable portion of the population, in fact, state pensions only provide about $25 a month for many retirees.
Understood in this way, my night out at the mall may have offered me the most distorting mirror imaginable about the actual state of China and its economy. Not only are people seeking to leave via emigration, but Chinese also seem to be expressing their feelings and confidence about the future in another, even more telling way: their decisions about when or whether to get married and have children.
Narratives about falling fertility rates have become commonplace around the world in recent years, but that only obscures the drama of what is happening around decisions like these in China. As the demographer Nicholas Eberstadt has pointed out, since 2013, the year that Xi Jinping became the country’s leader, the number of first marriages in the country has fallen by more than half. There were only half as many births in 2022 as just six years earlier, meanwhile, and these numbers are still falling. Not even the collapse of the Soviet Union, Mao Zedong’s Great Famine, or the genocide in Cambodia managed to cut the fertility rate, or average number of births per woman, by as large a percentage as China has seen during these years.
Almost all well-regarded demographers agree that China’s population is going to shrink dramatically over the coming decades. This, of course, doesn’t mean that the country is going to disappear. No society facing declining fertility has figured out how to reverse this trend. To even slow it down, though, China will have to revise its social compact yet again, doing much more to provide opportunity, affordability, and economic security not for the fancy mall shoppers, but for everyone else.