Manufacturing Happiness. Walking through one of Shanghai’s many, many retail labyrinths with a friend, she says, “aren’t these cute? You should get one, they’re cheap.” Disposable fashion, electronics, tiny plastic baubles and toys, China’s overflowing with things you don’t need. Or if you did need them you’d probably want to buy them elsewhere so that they would last longer than a week. As I reflect on the past couple of months, what affected me most in China was not China itself, but that parts of China seem like America’s problems magnified. It was like waltzing into a possible future with some of the U.S.’s most challenging issues: the widening gap between wealth and poverty, pollution, GMOs, information surveillance under the guise of protection, and, one that was quite glaring, unbridled consumerism and focus on retail spending as a route to happiness. All of these things are alive and kicking in China and the outcome is quite dark. It’s a middle class minimally satiated by retail spending and a populous that keeps quiet out of fear. China’s consumerist makeover is touting homogenized culture. Parts of Shanghai are exactly like walking down any street in a U.S. metropolis. Same brands, same retail playgrounds, same idealized beauty created to instill the belief that buying things will somehow make us happy. It’s a fallacy. No amount of things will ever make a person truly happy. Being caught in a hamster wheel of spending and debt is simply another brand of oppression that is rampant in both the U.S. and China. With this type of consumer culture, we all lose. We lose quality of life. We lose the value of the little things in life that matter. We become numb. The wonderful details in life are glossed over by the need to consume. It’s an addiction like any other - one that marketers work very hard to hook us with. The disposable clothing and electronics we buy globally carry a higher price than we can ever measure. Sure, we’re somewhat aware of this, but at ground level it’s incomprehensibly staggering. The big pile of stuff in your office / garage / spare room / attic - the reason you are able to accumulate so much is because someone else is paying for it with the quality of their life. That eight dollar pair of jeans is possible because someone on the other end is living in squalor. Everything is a trade and the price of globalization is humanity. The manufacturing partnership between the U.S. and China is almost as frightening as war. Partnership condones the conditions in China. Partnership actively benefits from the tragedy of others, getting things on the cheap, undercutting the market because the market is undercutting the people creating the goods. Present day Shanghai feels like a city built only for appearances, for the illusion of success, the illusion of quality. Shanghai is the Heavenly Kingdom’s trophy wife. Shes pretty on the surface, but no amount of plastic surgery can cover up the fact that she’s hurting inside. China would love for you to see Shanghai’s shiny new skyline and believe the show, to bask in the glow of her GDP numbers - after all, she’s pumping a lot of money into Shanghai as a beacon to the world. But the humanity at ground level tells a very different story. There’s a word in Chinese for this type of thing: Zi-qi-qi-ren: self deception while deceiving others. It’s the hotel that advertises with a different picture than the actual property. It’s the photoshopped government officials on roads that don’t exist in reality. It’s the counterfeit luxury brands that nearly everyone wears. It’s false fronts - the vast, empty, malls and high rises that seem to be everywhere. It’s painting the trim on the exterior of an apartment building with unspeakable living conditions and calling it renovated. It’s pretending something is what it isn’t. It’s playing make believe on a grand level that affects peoples lives. Nothing is as it seems in China and the contrast there cannot be overstated. A woman clad in designer heels, real or fake undetermined, steps over a migrant selling vegetables on the sidewalk. Modern day Shanghai offers unspeakable living conditions mere footsteps away from a luxury mall. These worlds exist simultaneously and more exaggerated than perhaps anywhere on earth. China’s wealthy class actively turns the other cheek and the middle class is learning to do the same. The middle class is quiet, likely out of fear and because their life is slightly more tolerable now. If you asked me to sum up China, my answer is that there are some extremely beautiful parts, and, like anywhere, people are generally kind on an individual basis. But on the whole, present day China sucks. It’s abrasive. It’s consumer driven. The poverty and living conditions for a large amount of the population are absolutely inhumane. China is greed, magnified. China is what happens when scarcity and extreme wealth sit in the same room together. It’s a populous embedded with deep seated fear. It’s short-term thinking, complete disregard for the environment, and, perhaps most disappointing, for fellow man. It’s very strange to be sitting in Italy, one of the most beautiful spots on earth, going through imagery from one of the most challenged areas of the planet. If two more opposite places in the world exist, I’d be surprised. My own life seems to be comprised of polarities and this journey, through contrasting spaces outside of myself, has proved to be intensely interesting. It’s forced me to be more aware - to feel things I’d rather not, things that in another time I likely would have pushed aside, pushed away. Part of me wants to drop this China project entirely. So much of it is heartbreaking, but it seems important to acknowledge the issues. As difficult and heavy as the content is, I would regret not completing this series. I hope the experience will color my work in the future with more empathy and understanding of the human condition as a whole. But I’d be lying if I didn’t say that I look forward to closing this book and working on something else, something lighter, something beautiful. What I love about life in Italy is that they have enough respect for their citizens to know that happiness rests not in how many things you possess, but instead in simply how you live. Italy consistently reminds me that life can be beautiful in the simplest of ways. It’s the details, the day to day, the relationships and experiences that make up our existence. No thing will ever take the place of that - it’s impossible. (Yes, Italy has problems of its own, but extreme consumerist culture is not one of them.) In contrast, China is the physical version of clicking on a bad advertising link on the internet - inundated with information fast and furious, coming at you from all directions. Parts of China seem as if someone hand plucked the worst parts of capitalism and delivered them to a developing nation. Advertising, extreme consumerism, idealized beauty, focus on status and “face” and that very odd part of human nature that longs to be part of an exclusive club. It’s as if a hyped up capitalist missionary visited, hawking a golden, but very broken worldview. Merchants of mediocrity with a big, shiny advertising band aid, never large enough cover a gaping wound of poverty and duress. I won’t pretend to know a great deal about the complexities of China, but what startled me most there was not that things were incredibly different from the U.S., but that so much was incredibly the same. I was told that seeing Shanghai was like peering into the future. It was naive of me to expect that future to be even slightly bright. China is simply one example of a possible future where power moves quietly in the shadows and people are sold the belief that mass consumption leads to happiness. Shanghai is deceivingly beautiful on the surface and very inhumane on the whole. Let it be a warning signal. Thankfully we all have the opportunity in our own small way to make sure that particular brand of the future does not come to life across the globe. blog.noticingthedetails/Manufacturing-Happiness
Posted on: Thu, 14 Nov 2013 17:50:13 +0000
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