Every day, just two Chinese companies, Shein and Temu, ship more than half a million parcels containing clothes and accessories to homes in the United States. In Europe meanwhile, these same retail platforms each had more than 50 million users in November. Offering low quality garments at even lower cost, and luring customers with sophisticated online marketing, these businesses are fuelling a casual yet hyperactive consumerism that makes Amazon look modest. A few weeks ago, it emerged that Shein is preparing to launch on the New York stock exchange, and might achieve one of the biggest valuations of recent years.
Shein has a special interest for me, since this company’s replacement of designers with algorithms was one of the first subjects I covered at The Pathos of Things. But today the story seems to have a wider salience. Last month, while Shein’s stock market plans were still progressing in secrecy, Chinese President Xi Jinping was in the United States, as the two superpowers tried to ease tensions that were escalating dangerously earlier in the year. During his visit, Xi met publicly with Joe Biden, and privately with the America’s business elite, but the commentary and rhetoric surrounding these events still carried a jittery tone.
The prospect of a conflict between the U.S. and China is almost too horrific to contemplate. Even short of armed confrontation, a full-scale economic war would deliver a titanic hit to living standards, especially if you live in a country, like Britain, for which China is the largest source of imports. Since the Covid pandemic we’ve already glimpsed what happens when supply chains are disrupted. Things become more expensive, and some of them disappear.
The loss of Shein’s ultra-fast fashion seems trivial by comparison, but it illustrates an aspect of this scenario which is rarely discussed. Consumer products and their attendant rituals have become, for us, a way of life – a wellspring of culture and identity that permeates our societies as extensively as religion and custom did in the past. If the movement of money and goods between east and west is seriously disrupted, we will lose much more than a percentage of our disposable income; our lives will look and feel unimaginably different.
The thousands of garments Shein sends to western countries each day are the result of a process that started in the 1960s, when European and American companies started looking for cheaper ways to make products overseas, but which accelerated rapidly at the end of the 20th century. Today British people buy five times more clothes than they did in the 1980s. Much of that consumption is now driven by social media platforms that, in turn, could not exist without the iPhones only China can make, or the semiconductors only Taiwan can make.
The really explosive globalisation took place in the 1990s and 2000s, when millions of workers in China and Eastern Europe’s former Communist states entered the global market. The importance of this moment can’t be overstated; it was a political and social revolution. In many western countries, it undermined the ability of workers to bargain effectively and thus to be an organised political force; in return, they gained access to an enormous range of imported products. Low wages and low prices meant (until recently) low levels of inflation, and that meant low interest rates and thus huge amounts of cheap credit. And cheap credit, of course, meant yet more products to buy.
Soaring mortgages and household debt, the boom in university graduates and service sector work, the speculative investments propping up dodgy business models like Uber and Netflix: all these symptoms of recent decades can be traced, along with the cheap TVs, back to the Great Globalisation.
And all of them, in one way or another, fed the growth of the consumer mind-set. Though modern consumerism emerged a good deal earlier, the last forty years have been transformative. As Daniel Miller’s pointed out in his 1987 classic, Material Culture and Mass Consumption, theorists at that time were still reluctant to recognise mass consumption as an authentic form of culture. Using categories left over from a society of producers – high culture for the leisured classes, solidarity for the working classes – they could only see the articulation of identity through consumer goods as a yuppie phenomenon, or a kind of mass delusion. Today, by contrast, it would sound strange to deny the status of culture to designer trainers and Netflix series, or nutrition supplements and iPads, unless you believe that modern societies actually have no culture. In any case, intellectuals who make such pronouncements are now as likely to be invested in these products as anyone else.
Politics is another revealing case. Whereas once it was the producers – that is, workers – who organised, protested, and made demands, now such activities tend to be focused on consumption. Drivers protest fuel prices, campaign groups arrange boycotts, activists try to shape who or what can appear in the media. This direct action is coordinated not through unions but on social media, itself a form of mass consumption.
There are good reasons to think we should be less globalised, and produce more of certain things for ourselves. But this won’t, as some hope, make us a society of workers again. The flight of blue-collar jobs overseas has allowed us to overlook the awkward fact that, if this option had not been available, businesses would have tried to cut their wage bills through automation instead. That is what businesses do. Hence in the U.S., where the Biden government has invested massive sums in building-up domestic manufacturing, that sector is actually expected to lose jobs over the next decade, thanks to automation.
Meanwhile, the culture of mass consumption has itself become global. With a middle class larger than the entire population of the United States, China has long since been more than just the factory of the world; it is a consumer society in its own right. Elon Musk, Tim Cook and the other businessmen who met with Xi Jinping last month are as interested in Chinese markets as Chinese labour. So it’s by no means only western countries whose way of life would be endangered if globalisation seized-up. America and China are becoming increasingly antagonistic at a moment when they are more similar than ever.
I thought you might enjoy this essay about crappy things: https://walterkirn.substack.com/p/generation-junk?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=258587&post_id=139668402&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=podup&utm_medium=email