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by Richard Mellor
Afscme Local 444, retired
Afscme Local 444, retired
GED/HEO
Just going through some old material and came across this piece. I think it is still relevant today and not just for women in China but here at home and throughout the world. I wrote this is December 2005. RM
“Beautiful faces have
beautiful dreams,” says Wang Yaoyao, a contestant in the Miss Artificial
Beauty contest held in China’s Hubei province.
Ms Wang is special, a product of the new China, and a product of the
free market. Ms Wang is a representative
of the plastic surgery business that is sponsoring the contest. In a
country of 1.3bn people, despite some 800 million of them living in poverty,
global corporations and the budding Chinese bourgeois are wringing their hands
at the potential for moneymaking.
Ms Wang is free you see; free to make herself beautiful,
beautiful for Proctor and Gamble, Hollywood, and the men and women that will
use her new found looks to sell soap or perfume. But for Ms Wang it is more
than that, it is her ticket to the good life in the new China. The 21 year-old Wang, (not long an adult)
received free plastic surgery on the condition that she promote the hospital
that did the procedure. The plastic
surgeon was generous, giving her, according to the Financial Times, “a nose job, double eyelids, a smaller chin,
thicker lips and a tummy tuck”. Ahh!
sweet commerce. Can the old regime be
blamed for wanting to isolate itself from the west? After all, it was not really the west they
were protecting themselves against, but bourgeois culture that turns everything
in to a commodity.
Ms. Wang, an advertising executive tells the Financial Times, “Even if your smart and good at what you
do, nobody will listen to what you have to say if you’re ugly. But if you’re beautiful, people want to be
close to you immediately. Then you can talk to them and get your message
across.” How sad is this? It is not confined to China of course. Women in the US who do not fit the standard
of beauty determined by bourgeois culture and the men who dominate it face the
same barriers.
Could you imagine the response were clinics here in the U.S.
operating on American women, especially ones of European descent, making them
look more Chinese. There’d be racist
attacks on Asian Americans. The capitalist press would be whipping up
nationalism and fear of being taken over by the “Yellow Peril”. Chinese,
Japanese, South East Asian doctors offices would be firebombed. Asian teachers would be victimized in the
schools.
But in China the beauty pageant is a moneymaker and they are
flourishing. It is not just the plastic
surgery business that sees dollar signs.
The perfume industry, clothing, makeup, and let’s not forget the auto
industry, all see a bright future in the disfigurement of human beings. After all gentlemen, you’ll need the right
car, the right watch, the right suit to capture one of these beauties. The beauty pageant market, like any other, is
facing saturation point according to the Times.
But as the market ebbs and flows, the damage to millions of young girls,
and the young men who expect this beauty of them will be devastating, both
psychologically and physically, not just the surgery, but suicides and sickness
as the reality sets in and women become slaves to this idea which fails to
produce results, fails to make them “happy”.
Admittedly, there are millions of Chinese women,
particularly in the rural areas, whose dreams are far more basic than Ms.
Wang’s; food, shelter and a job. And I am not able to judge the impact of the
phenomenon from afar, but the pace of change in Chinese society is considerable
by most accounts. The economic potential
is significant as global corporations like P&G, Volvo, Clark’s shoes and
Malaysia Airlines (religious condemnation of capitalism doesn’t seem to be an
obstacle here) invest in these pageants.
In 2003, Chinese women bought $9bn worth of beauty products and this is
only the tip of the iceberg from global capitalism’s point of view. The more they convince women they are ugly
and that this is why they cannot achieve success, the greater the investment
potential.
Like all aspects of the roaring Chinese economy it is quite
likely this bourgeois consciousness and the economic basis for it will be cut
across by the increasing frustration of the Chinese masses. Incidents of social unrest in China have
increased 600% over the last decade.
Massive wealth alongside extreme poverty does not go unnoticed and each
small release of the Stalinist bureaucracy’s boot off the necks of the Chinese
workers increases their confidence.
There is no doubt that there is no reversal for the Chinese bureaucracy,
not without major social upheaval. The
capitalist road has been traveled too far.
But the future is unsure. The
massive reserves held by China may give a certain leeway to the bureaucracy,
maybe they can make some considerable concessions in the face of an
increasingly restless population; no one can be sure what the future holds
except that it is a volatile situation.
Despite the propaganda of the western press, bourgeois
individualism and selfishness cannot exist alone in the consciousness of the
Chinese workers. In the last analysis,
consciousness has a material base and in the case of China, it has had 50 years
without the market. But it has had its
effect. “When I ask my male students what they dream of, they say owning a car
and being with a beautiful woman. They
never used to talk like that.” One university professor tells the
Times. That’s progress. (1)
As I read this article that spurred me to write this commentary,
I was reminded of Marx and Engels’ comments on the global nature of the
market. I am adding them as a reminder
of their genius.
“The need of a
constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the
entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere,
establish connexions everywhere.
The bourgeoisie
has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character
to production and consumption in every country........ In place of the old local and
national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every
direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also
in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations
become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become
more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures,
there arises a world literature.
The bourgeoisie, by the rapid
improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated
means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into
civilisation. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with
which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’
intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations,
on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels
them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become
bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.
You
can’t beat that.
Karl
Marx/Frederich Engel’s The Communist Manifesto 1848
(1) The article from which these details were taken is, The
China Doll Revolution
Financial Times 11-05-05 FT Weekend Section
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