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That situation may have been aggravated by the increasing exposure of the Chinese people to an ever wider array of influences from abroad. One week there is talk of a Disney-style amusement park for southern Peking. The next, General Motors delivers a fleet of 20 Cadillac limousines to be used by visiting businessmen. Last April, party officials, after solemnly viewing videotapes of the British rock group Wham!, allowed the band to appear in Peking, complete with scantily clad go-go dancers and pelvis-thrusting vocalist. A golf course is scheduled to open next May in the historic Valley of the Ming Tombs, with prospects of ski slopes, a racetrack and a hotel to be built nearby.
The foreign influence is most visible in the very appearance of the people. During more than two decades of Maoism, the Chinese wore proletarian garb, look-alike unisex uniforms in drab colors. Now the lusterless Mao suits have given way to a variety of clothing, including trench coats and safari jackets. The result is a transformation in the look of many a city street. Here and there, sunglassed trendies wearing 3-in. platform shoes, English-slogan T shirts and zipper-pocketed jeans share the sidewalks with young women whose ruffled shirts are incongruously set off by knee-high stockings.
The average Chinese is now said to spend a quarter of his or her salary on clothes. Tickets for garment fairs are sold by scalpers at 50 times face value. The biggest rage of all is for Western-style suits. So desired is the new look that for a while some factories and work units handed out Western suits instead of cash bonuses to deserving workers. The practice was soon officially dubbed one of the Eight New Evil Winds* and eventually banned by the government. But fashion is still coming on strong in Chinese life, at least in the big cities. "It's fantastic," says Pierre Cardin, as eleven Chinese models sashay up a Peking runway in black silk dresses made for him in Shanghai. "In ten
years this place will be like Seoul." That is precisely what Deng's opponents--and perhaps Deng himself--fear. As China dresses up, it has also begun to pursue new goals. Under Mao, the people were told that their lives would be enriched if they dedicated themselves to work. Now they are being exhorted to work in order to get rich. "Our government promotes the policy that some will get rich first," says Du Runsheng, the top party adviser on rural affairs. "Then others will get rich. Our final goal is that all people will be rich." The words kuaile, or pleasure, and yule, or recreation, have crept back into the national vocabulary. "Only with an adequate amount of wining and dining, fun and games," says an editor of the China Youth Daily, "will the workers' productive power be restored."
The invitation to pleasure is being taken up with accelerating zest. Beauty parlors have mushroomed. Sedate discos and bowling alleys have sprung up. Citizens are snapping up $100 cameras and going on picture-taking sprees. In a few cities, six out of seven families own a television set, on which they can watch commercials offering a wide range of domestic and foreign consumer goods. There are aerobics classes and body-building sessions; one of the beauty items for sale in the capital is a fengruqi, a machine purported to enlarge the breast.