TENS of thousands of Chinese people have taken up a challenge to live on the equivalent of less than £10 per week. As the country lurches into the economic gloom, workers who once thought nothing of buying designer trinkets and taking taxis to the office are quickly tightening their belts.
In the glitzy cities of Beijing and Shanghai, huge numbers of office workers are eschewing expensive Western brands for traditional, and cheap, Chinese products.
More than 1,00,000 people have now signed up to the ‘100 yuan challenge’, an experiment to see whether it is possible to live on under £10 a week in modern China. Wang Hao, the 24-year-old who came up with the idea, said he wanted to persuade “high-earning, big-spending people” to embrace a simpler life. The challenge spread through the Internet after it was posted on one of China’s top websites, Soufun.com. At the beginning, only six people responded to Wang’s call. Even Wang himself failed the challenge in the first week.
The website offered cash prizes to candidates who completed the challenge and who wrote an online diary about how they managed. “Most of the participants are office workers” he said. Wang himself earns just over 6,400 yuan a month (£640) and spends half of it in mortgage repayments on his house. “I try to save the money I spend on transport and food. I used to take a taxi most of the time, but now I use a bicycle. I used to eat at KFC and McDonald’s but now I go to Chinese places for noodles and steamed buns”. Yum Brands, the owners of 2,500 KFCs and 416 Pizza Huts on the mainland said their same-store sales were up just one per cent in the last three months of 2008, compared to 17 per cent a year earlier.
Many fast food outlets have cut prices by up to 40 per cent.
Tactics for scrimping and saving include carpooling to work and smuggling food home from the office canteen for dinner. Li Shengjie, 25, said she is now eating breakfast, lunch and dinner in the office. “I never missed a chance to shop, but now Louis Vuitton is off my list. I used to have all the heating on in the winter, but now I have a hot shower and then go to bed with an electric blanket,” she said. With the money she is saving, she said she hoped to open a cake shop in the future.
Some said it was possible to live on a meagre sum, and to rediscover some of China’s traditions in the process.
Chen Liang, a 29-year-old film director, said that even Shanghai’s haughtiest prima donnas were now using Mei Jia Jing, a cheap Chinese face cream that he said rivalled any luxury beauty product from the West.
“Being thrifty can be fashionable in China. I have been researching products made in the ’50s and ’60s when Shanghai brands were famous.
Orlando Bloom, the Hollywood actor buys Feiyue shoes for £50 a pair in Paris but you can buy them here for £2,” he said.