I was at a news briefing last week by the Communist Party chief of Quanjiao, a little-known county in Anhui province . 'Have you heard of this place?' I asked the woman journalist next to me. 'Of course, all the wives of Shanghai know it,' she said with a big smile, writing the name in another way that means 'give everything over'. 'That is what all our husbands learn at the wedding!' In Shanghai, it is the wives who control the family purse strings and are the main targets of the money spent in the world's second-biggest advertising market. So, what do they want to buy?
A recent survey by Madeforchina, a Shanghai-based internet research company, shed some light on this billion-dollar mystery. It asked 3,000 women between 21 and 33 in white-collar jobs, earning more than 2,000 yuan a month.
Half said that skin whitener was their favourite product and 38 per cent had at least three creams. Historically, white skin has stood for beauty and status; dark skin for manual labour and poverty.
Asked which part of the body they would most like to change, 27 per cent opted for the face, 20 per cent the legs and 18 per cent worried about the size of their tummy. In contrast to similar surveys in the west, fewer than 5 per cent wanted to change their bottom, or hair quality. But only 2 per cent said they would resort to plastic surgery, while 47 per cent said the best way was to join a health club. So, cosmetic surgery is still not totally socially acceptable in China.
The findings appear in X-tribes China, a quarterly produced in Shanghai by Access Asia, a consumer research company. 'Women are caught between their various and varied responsibilities, and advertisers need to respect this,' it said. 'They buy whitening cream to remove skin blemishes based on a centuries-old notion of Chinese beauty; they choose expensive brands of infant formula milk to 'protect' their children and also splash out on sexy lingerie to please themselves and their partners.
'Traditional notions are constantly matched by modern ideas and trends. Successful marketers are those who understand and act upon the fusion of the two.'