【2011.04.18 卫报】European football, cars and fashion seduce China

青蛙小王子

European football, cars and fashion seduce China

What do the Chinese like about Europe? Researchers hope the answers will improve our relationship with them

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Louis Vuitton benefits from the Chinese people’s fascination with European fashion. Photograph: Alexander F Yuan/AP

David Beckham is an icon. Louis Vuitton handbags are a "must have" (but not necessarily among football fans) and sales of the latest Volkswagen Golf GTi are buoyant. Welcome to Communist China in the second decade of the 21st century. A new research project suggests that football, cars and fashion are what intrigue the Chinese most about Europe. Next up is perfume, historical sites, music, film, nature, technology and beer.

More than 3,000 Chinese citizens were asked how they see Europeans and the European Union as part of a project known as Chinese Views of the EU, funded by £1.4m from the European Commission's research support programme. The programme is being led by the University of Nottingham working with researchers in universities in Beijing, Leiden in the Netherlands and Bremen in Germany.

The researchers point out that consumerism hasn't completely taken over Chinese consciousness, as more than half of the respondents said they like European ideas of democracy. But there may still be some way to go: when respondents were asked to name European historical figures they knew, Napoleon Bonaparte, Adolf Hitler, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and Karl Marx topped the list.
While the main part of the study concentrated on the city dwellers, a separate survey of 700 or so government officials, NGOs, business people and media people showed better knowledge of the EU.
"The greater the knowledge of European procedures, the greater the tendency to be positive about the EU," says Richard Pascoe, consultant to and former director of Nottingham University's China Policy Institute. "The survey suggests that if we engage more effectively with Chinese people, they will have a more positive view of Europe."
Beckham may not have made it on to the list of historical figures, but the Chinese are certainly seduced by the magnetism of his instantly recognisable image. "Premier League and European Champions League have been beamed into bars as well as homes across China for some time," says Pascoe, who set up the project three years ago. Replica shirts with footballers Wayne Rooney and Lionel Messi's names on the back are worn, as well as woven, in China.
Dr Jasmine Zhang Li, a research fellow at Nottingham University's School of Contemporary Chinese Studies, says there is a rapidly growing urban middle class with spending power. "Louis Vuitton handbags are mostly bought by Chinese tourists. Like anything with a Burberry label, it's a very popular brand."
Cars that were once made in Europe are popular, too. "Almost all the European motor companies have joint ventures in China and well over 1,500 cars are sold in Beijing in any one day," she says.
But, as ever, progress can have downsides. "That's why the streets are so congested," says Pascoe, who is old enough to remember a very different China. He went there first as an undergraduate in the mid 1970s, when the Pudong district of Shanghai was made up of rice fields and a ferry terminal rather than "a forest of skyscrapers". Back then, you wouldn't have been allowed to conduct a survey like this, he says. "And even if you had been, all the answers would have been the same, as everybody would have parroted the Communist party line. Otherwise, they would have been arrested and sent to a prison camp. Nowadays you can get honest answers, as people are not afraid any more."
But social networking sites are still banned, and the Chinese government has put in place a sophisticated censorship mechanism to block comment on controversial topics such as Tibet and Tiananmen Square. But Pascoe says the Chinese have not totally missed out on the internet explosion. "It's not democracy as we would understand it," he says, "but this amazing forum for communication and debate has had a hugely positive impact on the way people can express their opinions."
Yet there are still big differences between Chinese and European culture. "We are prone to constantly misunderstanding one another," he says. "There was virtually no contact between us for 2,000 years and then, as soon as there was, it quickly became a clash of civilisations in which, as the Chinese see it, the warlike Europeans got the upper hand and started to colonise chunks of Chinese cities such as Shanghai, Tianjin and Guangzhou."
According to Pascoe, Chinese people have long memories and still see us Europeans as being quite aggressive. But, the research shows, there is a certain fondness for all things European, which could be capitalised on. "The EU needs to tap in more to this reservoir of goodwill. But you can't improve a relationship unless you make a real effort to understand the other side and take the trouble to work out why they think what they think. That's what this project is all about."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/apr/18/china-european-culture

青蛙小王子