Being a Consumer in China

Every now and then a story comes over the Reuters wire that makes you wonder just what the real story is:

Three people died and 31 others were injured in a stampede as shoppers scrambled for cut-price cooking oil at a Carrefour store in China on Saturday, Xinhua news agency reported.

The tragedy came during a promotion to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the founding of the store in Shapingba district in southwest China.

People began queuing in the early hours of Saturday to buy the cooking oil, said Gao Chang, a spokesman for the Shapingba district government. When the shop opened for business, throngs of people burst in and a mass stampede occurred.

We all know about lines at gasoline pumps and the kind of overt hostility they can provoke, but this is about cheap cooking oil! Now whatever we may think about automobiles, cooking oil is far less of a luxury than a full tank of gas; so why should there have been a stampede at the opportunity to get the stuff at a lower price. Was the discount so great to stimulate such an overwhelming demand; and, if so, what is it really like for the urban Chinese consumer to come home with a shopping bag of stable items for the entire family? My guess is that this is a symptom indicating that the bimodal distribution of wealth in China is as much a problem as it is in any other industrialized nation, whatever its political ideology may be.

There is an old joke about Leonid Brezhnev at the height of his power in the Soviet Union. He invited his mother to visit and show her all the perquisites of his power: the dacha, the fleet of limousines, and all the luxury foods kept in his kitchen. After a few days of this grand tour, he said, "Well, mama, what to you think now of your little boy from Kamenskoe?" She looked back at him and said, "This is all very nice, my son; but what will you do when the Communists take over?"

Are the conditions for putting stable food on the table in China so bad that the government is going to have to worry about what happens if communists (note the lower-case) come to power?