Reading Comprehension

Read the passage carefully. Then answer the questions below.

The average Chinese consumer has a monthly disposable income of a meagre 640 Yuan. Paying 399 Yuan for a pair of jeans may seem extravagant to the average Chinese but not to Jimmy Xue. Not if the jeans have a cool Jack and Jones label on them, and not if the 22-year-old student knows they are the real thing. They are about four times the price of local jeans, but he feels the brand is worth it.

There are 30 million Chinese like Jimmy Xue - young, urban and affluent - and they have the purchasing power to force the world’s biggest companies to change their marketing strategies. A unique combination of historical circumstances has turned them into a generation like no other. They are the product of China’s one-child policy, introduced in 1979 and coincided with a period of unseen wealth creation.

“The one-child policy almost forced people to spoil their children,” says David McCaughan, a Tokyo-based consumer researcher for advertising firm McCann-Erickson. There is a generation who thinks that being spoilt is natural. As a result, they have expensive taste and have already established themselves as a consumer power.

According to public relations company Hill and Knowlton, in a country that once celebrated the rough, proletarian look, they spend a monthly 82 Yuan on cosmetics alone. They want nothing to do with pirated products. “They really hate fakes,” said Hung Huang, publisher of Seventeen, a magazine for teenagers. “When their parents buy them fakes, they are annoyed because they think they are being ripped off,” she said. What they want is authentic brands and in great ever-changing variety, say market analysts.

Since they have grown up witnessing a society transform itself faster than before, they consider it natural to constantly changing tastes and preferences. “The old dynamics of brand loyalty goes out the window,” says McNaghter. “In other countries, it’s a risk to change brands, but in China, it’s a risk if you don’t change brands.”

This particular urge for change could potentially have political consequences at some point in the future, say some observers. Many high-spending youths are China’s elite, groomed at the country’s best high schools and colleges. “They are a very confident generation, and this will affect the way they feel about how much power they have in making social and economic decisions in China,” says Hung, the publisher.

China may soon have its own breed of angry young men and women insisting on leaving their mark on society. According to Hung, ‘Rage’ is considered cool by many Chinese teenagers, who find their role models among the likes of chronically moody rap king Eminem.

Those attending elite schools often speak idiomatic English with an American accent - thanks to native language teachers - and may come across as more cosmopolitan than their parents.

But for all their openness to the outside world, they could eventually turn out to become even more nationalistic than the Chinese before them. This is what distinguishes the ancient capital of Beijing from Shanghai, China’s most cosmopolitan city, according to Carl C. Rohde, a Dutch researcher of market trends. “Beijing is definitely part of the world, but they have a keener sense of preserving their Chinese roots. That’s part of their pride,” he says.