IUAES2015 panel session #5 [Room 222]
16 July 2015, 11.00 – 12.30 hrs.
Maximo BADARO
Universidad Nacional De San Martin (Argentina) / CONICET
contact: mbadaro@unsam.edu.ar
Abstract
While many specialists on the market of consumption in China (journalists, consultants, marketing professionals) have tended to depict the consumption of foreign luxury goods by new wealthy Chinese as a conspicuous behavior that does not pay attention to material and immaterial qualities of the products. However, in recent years this portray has started to concur with another one that highlight the increasing “maturity” and “sophistication” of these people as consumers. In this paper I explore how these ideas express economic, social and political anxieties about the risk of profanation of rooted values of western modernity raised by the impressive and spreading buying power of wealthy Chinese at a global level.