China :: Lifestyle

• Designer goods sales set to hit record £150bn in 2011 • Study says Chinese market will grow 30% this year The 'label lust' of newly wealthy Chinese consumers is expected to help spending on luxury goods return to pre-credit crunch levels next year. After last year's "annus horribilis" for luxury retailers, a study from American consultancy Bain & Co today suggested the recovery was now in full swing with sales of high-end goods such as designer handbags, watches and champagne expected to surpass €170bn (£150bn) in 2011. Leading figures in the luxury goods industry have been talking with increasing conviction of recovery and today Santo Versace, the chairman of Italian fashion house which bears his family name, said: 'In the first half of this year we talked about a light at the end of the tunnel. On the basis of the preliminary 2010 figures, we can confirm that positive trend.' Versace also chairs influential Italian luxury goods association Altagamm...

Chinese women are drinking collagen to gain 'skin as soft as a baby's' Age may be respected in China, but wrinkles are definitely not – fighting the process is a boom industry. According to Euromonitor, the Chinese skincare sector was worth £3.3bn in 2007, while cosmetic surgery raked in an estimated £1.5bn last year and is thought to be growing at around 20% a year. Now women have added a new weapon to their armoury of facelifts and Botox injections: collagen. Most Brits associate it with lip injections and the resultant trout pouts, but Chinese women are drinking it instead. Wander around department stores in Shanghai and Beijing and advertising slogans bombard you with promises such as: "Take a collagen drink for 30 days and have skin as soft as a baby's." Cosmetics firm DHC China uses fish collagen in its drinks, but promises that they do not smell fishy. Sure enough, the pale yellow juice-like drink tastes a little sweet, a little sour, but certainly not ...

China’s rising elite is importing a new American lifestyle, complete with fake lakes, stucco ranch houses, and Hummers in the driveway... Is China doomed to repeat all of America’s mistakes? A guard wearing a one-size-too-big military uniform salutes my driver through the gate at the grand entrance to Orange County. Suddenly we're transported from China to, well, somewhere else. Where, exactly, is hard to say. It would be strange enough if Orange County, this gated community near the Beijing airport, were the straight-up replica of Southern California it claims to be. But it is stranger than that. The development, 45 minutes up the freeway from Beijing's better-known Forbidden City, has the appearance of a Disney theme park where someone mixed up all the different sections-a smidgen of Epcot's faux Paris intermingled with Main Street U.S.A.'s Americana. At Orange County, California-style ranch houses sit alongside English Tudors and a French-style formal gard...

Models parade in outfits made of condoms during a fashion show at the 4th China Reproductive Health New Technologies & Products Expo in Beijing Models parade in outfits made of condoms during a fashion show at the 4th China Reproductive Health New Technologies & Products Expo in Beijing. Condoms of all shapes and sizes were used to make dresses, hats and even lollipops.

The first East Asian survey of lifestyles and attitudes by a cosmetics company has revealed some sharp differences between the women of Tokyo, Shanghai, Beijing, Taipei and Seoul. courtesy of Kanebo Cosmetics Inc. The first East Asian survey of lifestyles and attitudes by a cosmetics company has revealed some sharp differences between the women of Tokyo, Shanghai, Beijing, Taipei and Seoul. Unveiled in Tokyo on Tuesday, the six-month study by Kanebo Cosmetics examined women's expectations of work, their aims for five years' time, their personal aspirations, attitudes about beauty and make-up preferences. "The biggest difference we saw was the emphasis that Japanese women place on human relationships - in particular they care about being liked by others - while the women in the other cities are more concerned with personal growth through their ...

Restoring gender equilibrium in China: Internet chat groups have sprang up where women exchange advice on how to conceive girls. The real estate bubble is helping out : Internet chat groups have sprang up where women exchange advice on how to conceive girls. Rising property prices are driving the change, which is expected to be confirmed by China’s once-a-decade census that started on Monday, because Chinese families must traditionally buy a flat for a son before he can marry. “My husband and I don’t earn much and I can’t imagine how we can buy a flat for a son,” says Zhang Aiqin of Pujiang in Zhejiang province. “And it is not only a flat,” says Zhang Yun, a Shanxi province native who lives in Shanghai, alluding to the cost of educating and marrying off a boy. “Sons bring economic pressure ... [but] ‘a daughter is a warm jacket for a mother’ when she is old,” she says, quoting an ancient Chinese idiom to illustrate the fact that many urbanised Chinese think daughters are ...

Ma Yaohai, a 53-year-old college professor, smokes as he talks to journalists at his home in Nanjing, China. AP Ma Yaohai is a man who stands up for his beliefs. That has caused problems for the former computer science teacher, because one of his beliefs is in the virtues of group sex, which is against the law in China. On May 20, Ma was sentenced by a Nanjing court to a three-and-a-half year prison term for the crime of "group licentiousness." But he maintains he did nothing wrong, and his case has provoked broad public debate in this rapidly changing nation about sexuality and the lines between government control and personal freedom. Prosecutors say the 53-year-old Ma, who divorced in 2003, began pursuing group sex in 2007. According to authorities, he used online chat groups to set up 35 meetings over a two-year period, half of which he participated in. Some,...

Problems for Adam and Eve Author Jo McMillan lived for many years in Beijing researching Chinese sexuality. Here she tells the story of visiting one of China’s first sex shops – part of a state-run hospital. F riday night at the gate of Beijing’s People’s Hospital. Doctors throw lab coats into panniers and pedal hard into the wall of home-time traffic. In the wintry air, their white, wet breath marks out their hurry to be gone. I watch a bus pull up at the stop and nurses lean into each other’s backs until something gives and there is room to get on. There is a door in the perimeter wall, blanked out with paper snowflakes, and a window covered with Santas and piped with drifts of snow. It is 1997, and this is the Adam and Eve, the first legal sex shop to open in China – housed here, in a state-run healthcare facility. A medicalized sex shop Inside, I am met with the fat stench of bleach and Swan Lake turned up too loud. Around the walls are neon-lit displays d...

Article 301 of China’s criminal law bans “crowd promiscuity,” with offenders liable to five years in jail. But in 1978, when China began its bold, capitalist-style economic and social experiment known as Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, attitudes toward sex began changing fast. BEIJING — In a photograph on his lawyer’s Web site, Ma Yaohai stares straight at the camera, cheekbones prominent above sunken cheeks, his expression intense, almost haunted. The 53-year-old computer scientist, dressed soberly in a dark jacket and polo-neck pullover, holds a sign saying: “Swinging is no crime.” Unfortunately for Mr. Ma, it is. Article 301 of China’s criminal law bans “crowd promiscuity,” with offenders liable to five years in jail. On April 7, Mr. Ma and 21 other members of his swingers’ circle were tried in the central city of Nanjing on group sex charges, in a case that is roiling society and provoking heated debates in academic circles, among friends and in the blogo...

If Chinese visit America, what should they know? I mean *really* know? Practical knowledge? What are the things they're not taught, that they won't get from books or movies, and that their teachers won't tell them? They're college students. They're going to stay in North Dakota for 5 months starting January 5th, then Florida for another 5 months after that. I'm going to tell them about all the things in American culture that they're not told in books, by teachers, or even by foreign teachers. All the things that aren't brought up because people simply don't think about them or because they make one side or the other side lose face. I feel responsible for them because frankly, they do know stuff, but there are also a lot of things that they're just simply not aware of and that no one will tell them until they're face to face with it (race issues, religion issues, politics, etc etc). Often they think "Americans are more open...

Wishful Thinking? China City Considers Smoking Ban : "China’s army of smokers can be seen puffing merrily away in restaurants, bars, schools, cabs, elevators and even—as one China Real Time reporter witnessed this morning–in hospital hallways. The habit is so widespread, the notion that China would ever follow places like California and New York in banning smoking barely seems to merit a second thought. Reuters A man blows out cigarette smoke as he sits in a hutong, Chinese for small alley, in central Beijing Aug.18, 2010. In a country where 301 million people smoke, only 16 percent of current smokers are looking to quit in the coming year, and barely one in four adults believes smoking increases the risks of lung cancer, strokes and heart attacks. That hasn’t stopped health authorities in Nanchang from giving it a try. Undaunted by the prospect of a collective nicotine fit, officials in Nanchang, a city about 800 kilometers southwest of Shanghai, are considering a sweeping law th...

ANSON, a 20-year-old psychology student, quietly follows a young woman from the entrance of a bookstore to the sixth floor. He may seem like a stalker, but he's just a plump, inept guy waiting for the perfect moment to practice the PUA (pick-up artist) skills that he paid 2,000 yuan (US$331) to learn. This is a practice session. He and seven other guys with sweaty palms and butterflies in their stomach have gone to a bookstore to approach a girl -- hopefully they will chat and she will agree to see him again. They're just a few of the many young Chinese men who have never had a date and are painfully awkward and uncomfortable about approaching girls. This is partly because they've been sheltered and pampered, and as single children they have gotten virtually everything they wanted. Partly because they think expressing interest in a girl will put them in a weak position and they will be rebuffed. Sometimes parents have forbidden them to date and they're not used to being...

HOT springs are deeply healing and relaxing, and in winter visitors can relieve the chill and soak up spectacular views, from as near as Nanjing to as far as Tibet. Chen Ye takes the waters. There's nothing like soaking in a hot spring in winter when it's cold outside, and bathers in steamy comfort can take in spectacular scenery, even snow-capped mountains. Of course, some springs are indoors, so there's no shocking temperature difference between the water and outside temperature. There are different pools of different temperatures from warm to hot. Balneologists who study therapeutic bathing and medicinal springs document numerous benefits from the dissolved minerals and gases. In general hot baths are hydrothermal therapy, they help loosen tight muscles, accelerate blood circulation and treat hypertension. They aid in pain relief, stress reduction and improve breathing. A good warm bath can either reduce fatigue or make for a good night's rest. Trace elements include...

Dozens of clowns walked in a procession towards Mexico City's Basilica de Guadalupe on Wednesday to thank Mexico's patron saint-- the Virgin of Guadalupe--for her blessings and to pray for her continuing protection over the coming year. Clowns from across Latin America sang, chanted, drummed and juggled their way towards the Basilica, where they took a group photo. They marched along the famous avenue, the Calzada de Guadalupe, into the crowded plaza outside the church. Millions of people from Mexico and Latin America visit the Basilica of Saint Mary of Guadalupe every year. The pilgrimage is a yearly tradition that brings clowns of all ages to Mexico for a colorful mass.

Founder of the People's Riders Club Thomas Chabrieres revs the engine of his Changjiang 750cc sidecar. WHILE Shanghai's congested streets are filled with scooters, electric bikes and motorcycles, an increasing number of serious - and well-heeled - bikers are revving up and hitting the open road or the race course. From riding high-performance racing bikes to vintage cruisers, these motorcyclists want to leave Shanghai's crowded streets behind. In recent years a number of clubs have sprung up. They include the Red Devils MC that predominately ride Harley-Davidson motorcycles, and the Black Bats and People's Riders Club who ride vintage bikes with sidecars, such as the Changjiang (Yangtze River) 750cc with sidecar (based on former Soviet Union army bikes that were based on BMWs). The biggest local club for motorcycle racers is Club 51. In addition, several informal groups organize longer rides. The burgeoning racing hub is the all-season Shanghai Tianma Circuit in Songjia...