Most Chinese agree that China has become a society that worships money. Getting rich, owning a big house and luxury cars are among the top things Chinese people want today.
Iceo.com, a mainland media that caters to business owners, has compiled a list of nine items Chinese people desire most.
1. Getting Rich
Getting rich is at the very top of Chinese people’s wish list. A poll conducted last February by Reuters and Ipsos found that 69 percent of Chinese consider money as the symbol for success. This is the highest percentage compared with responses from other nationalities in the more than 20-country poll.
Only 33 percent of Americans believe that money equals success, which is a bit ironic since Chinese have often labeled Americans as “US Dollar Imperialists.”
Huanqiu, a People’s Daily publication, subsequently conducted a similar survey, and the results were even more revealing: over 60 percent of Chinese said they “worship” money, and over 95 percent said they believe that money worshipping is a serious problem among all Chinese.
2. Big House
The second item on Chinese people’s must-have list is a house, and not just one. If they have any spare money, they will invest it in more and bigger houses, accumulating many properties, even though many of them stay empty.
Franklin Templeton Investments, a US-based asset management company, conducted a poll about people’s investment objectives, questioning 9,815 people in 19 countries. The results showed that 34 percent of Chinese people have set house purchasing as a priority as compared to 8 percent of Americans and 13 percent of Japanese.
3. Luxury Cars
Owning a car, especially a luxury one, is considered a status symbol for Chinese. As long as it is within the budget, a Chinese person will buy an expensive model rather than a practical one, a big one rather than a small one, and a sedan rather than a hatchback. Conversely, most people think it is shameful not to own a car and even more shameful to drive an inferior one.
In a survey by Hyundai’s advertising agency Innocean of 500 car owners each in Seoul, Beijing, and Shanghai, 60 percent of respondents from the two Chinese cities answered yes to the questions whether a car is an important means of displaying social status and whether it is important for maintaining face. Only 44.2 percent and 37.8 percent of respondents from Seoul answered yes to questions one and two, respectively.
More Chinese consumers also answered yes to questions of whether they would first consider the brand when choosing an automobile, and whether they like showing off their automobile to others.
4. Becoming the Boss
Chinese people like to be their own boss. They idolize the entrepreneurs listed on Forbes’ annual rich list. Ask any male college graduate, and he will most likely say his dream is to start his own company.
A 2010 survey by CCTV indicated that more than 30 percent of young people want to become a boss. An earlier survey in Beijing showed that of 870 people, 21.2 percent frequently thought of being the boss, and 30.8 percent thought of it sometimes. In economically developed Shanghai, however, 80 percent of respondents said they want to be the boss.
5. Winning the Lottery
Chinese people love to gamble and hope to become rich overnight. According to a survey, 200 - 400 million Chinese are playing the lottery, and 400,000 are seriously addicted to it.
In 2012, a total of 261.5 billion yuan (US$43 billion) worth of lottery tickets were sold in China, an increase of 18 percent or 40 billion yuan (US$6.56 billion) from the previous year.
The Chinese Business Intelligence website predicts that China’s lottery sales will exceed 300 billion yuan (US$49.3 billion) in 2013, and 500 billion yuan (US$82.2 billion) by 2018.
6. Becoming an Official
Though Chinese people hate officials, almost everybody wants to be one. In recent years, the number of people wanting to join the civil service has continued to surge.
According to statistics, 1.44 million people registered in the 2010 national civil service examination, eleven times more than the 123,000 who registered in 2003. In 2012 there were 1.3 million exam registrants, with a hiring ratio of 1 in 53. The most sought-after position had a record 4,961 applicants.
Now the civil service examination is the “No. 1 Test” in China, far exceeding entrance exams for Peking or Tsinghua Universities in difficulty.
Being an official became a tradition with Chinese people during imperial times when the examination was not part of an educational system, but a system for selecting officials. Nowadays, graduates choose to take the civil service exam mostly out of economic considerations. Starting a business in China is still difficult, whereas civil service jobs are stable and relaxed and offer high pay and various other benefits, subsidies, and hidden income. Hence college students scramble to get in.
7. Lucky in Love
Chinese people always hope to be “lucky” with the opposite sex. But now some preconditions have to be met before one can become lucky.
Lily net, in its 2011 Chinese marriage condition investigation report, said that over 90 percent of women require that a man have a stable income, and almost 70 percent require a house is a precondition for marriage.
Most males don’t have that kind of requirement, they just want a pretty young woman, which is also not that easy to come by with China’s one-child policy and selective abortion practice. Shanghai now has 500,000 unlucky left-over, older young adults who cannot find partners.
8. Emigration
With China’s economy surging during the past couple of decades, a large number of people have become very rich. But many of them have been moving their money and kids abroad and have obtained foreign passports owing to the multitude of unsafe social, political, and environmental hazards in the country.
A 2010 report by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, titled Global Politics and Safety, says China has become the largest nation of emigration, with 45 million Chinese living overseas.
Even among people of the middle class there is a common agreement that it is good to have at least one friend who has emigrated or is going through the emigration process. As for the poor, they too have the wish to leave the country if only they can scrape up the needed money.
9. Traveling the World
Today, millions of Chinese tourists are traveling the world. They enjoy the freedom of having a passport in hand and visiting distant places, shopping for luxury brand items and taking photos of famous landmarks.
According to data from China’s National Tourism Administration and other sources, 70.25 million Chinese went on oversea trips in 2011, a five times increase during the last ten years.
Translation by Frank Fang, Quincy Yu, and Amy Lien. Written in English by Gisela Sommer.
