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Is 650 yuan (US $ 101) enough to pay for all meals in a day?
According to Su Mang, former editor of Harper’s Bazaar China, no.
And your comments on it in a reality show they enraged Chinese social media users.
“We need to eat better, I can’t eat with such low standards,” she said on the show, in which 15 celebrities live together for 21 days.
Appalled at his comments, netizens pointed out that their own daily allowance for eating is generally less than 30 yuan.
Although Su, known as “The Devil Wears Prada from China”, has since clarified that this was a “misunderstanding”, the public did not seem convinced by his argument.
He said that the 650 yuan he was talking about was intended to cover all of the meals in the reality show.
“You can try to explain, but the truth is that celebrities they are elitists without realizing it“wrote one person on the Weibo microblogging platform.
This is only the last case of the public anger directed at a personality for being rich.
Earlier this year, Annabel Yao, the youngest daughter of Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei, enraged the internet when she suggested her life had been tough.
“I never thought of myself as a so called ‘princess’ … I think I’m like most people my age, i had to work hard and study hard before being accepted into a good school, ”she said in a flashy 17-minute documentary announcing her singing career.
Sharing the video on her Weibo account, the 23-year-old said signing with an entertainment company was a “special birthday present” that she had given herself.
His father’s fortune is estimated at $ 1.4 billion.
“They don’t deserve it”
For years, the wealthy Chinese have been known to be ostentatious.
They show off their luxury cars and bags online, often to the envy of their fans.
But more and more, any sort of display of wealth, intentional or not, he is greeted with hostility and disdain.
People like Su and Yao are attacked because many believe that famous people, as well as the calls fuerdairich second generation children, they just don’t deserve your very high income.
Compared to stars and their seemingly “easy” jobs, people complain about how hard you work and how little you earn“said Jian Xu of Deakin University, who studies Chinese media culture.
Haiqing Yu, professor of media studies at RMIT University in Melbourne, added that “Su Mang’s comments about his meals made people angry because they exposed the cracks that China is trying to hide“.
And that they are nothing but the fact that some people have too much, while others get by with too little.
The house of billionaires
Although the country’s average annual income is 32,189 yuan (just over US $ 5,000), or about 2,682 yuan per month, according to the National Bureau of Statistics, Beijing has also become home to more than billionaires. any other city in the world.
According to the Hurun report, which analyzes the level of wealth, China’s rich take a record $ 1.5 trillion in 2020, which is roughly half of UK GDP.
The wealth gap in China, it’s huge.
The fact that the wealthiest people shamelessly flaunt their assets is immediately seen as something insensitive.
While this is common in most countries facing an income inequality problem, China finds itself in an unusually awkward position, experts say.
For a long time people felt that could achieve “common prosperity”.
Something the ex-supreme leader Deng Xiaoping set as target even if it meant that some people and regions got richer first.
“But after more than 40 years since the opening of the country, the rich are only getting richer, leaving others far behind who feel disillusioned and helpless,” Xu said.
Sometimes the anger is due to an increase in “expectations that famous people contribute more (to society) because they are known to the public and have symbolic power.”
Last month, for example, there was a wave of outrage when it emerged that Actriz Zheng Shuang received about 2 million yuan per day for a TV role. The project paid him a total of 160 million yuan (about 25 million US dollars).
“What good is it to win 160 million yuan? Normal People Earning 6,000 Yuan Per Month Have to Work 2,222 Years Without Stopping [para alcanzar esa cifra]probably from the Qin dynasty, ”someone wrote on Weibo.
But the public was even more upset that Zheng was already mired in another controversy.
Earlier this year, she found herself embroiled in a dispute over surrogacy, illegal in China, when it emerged that she had abandoned two children born to surrogate mothers overseas.
It’s very embarrassing for someone to make so much money when they don’t see themselves as a good role model.
This is also the reason why, in 2018, Fan Bingbing aroused little sympathy when she was under house arrest for tax evasion.
And this despite the fact that the actress was one of the most popular stars in the country.
The art of the humble
The contempt for ostentation is also linked to the idea that it indicates a lack of cultureexperts say.
As China’s middle class has grown, educated city dwellers interpret the display of wealth “as a lack of sophistication or even as a “lower class” origin, ”John Osburg, author of“ Anxious Wealth: Money and Morality Among China’s New Rich, ”told the BBC.
“It is a risky task,” he said, adding that it is also a sign of “insecurity” about his social standing.
Still, the country’s appetite for luxury isn’t going away anytime soon.
According to market research firm Euromonitor International, China has overtaken Japan as the top personal luxury market in Asia-Pacific, and sales growth is expected to return to pre-pandemic levels by the end of the year.
The key, then, is that the rich can accomplish the ultimate balancing act: signaling their success, but in a more low-key way.
Yu noted that now, for some, showing off their wealth has become a movement that involves a humble form of bragging.
“Some of the rich are now trying to show themselves in a veiled way, instead of showing obvious images of material goods,” he said.
For example, influencer MengQiqi77, known to share regular updates of your luxurious lifestyle, once “complained” on Weibo that there were not enough charging stations for electric cars in his neighborhood.
“So we had no choice but to move to a bigger house with a private garage for my husband’s Tesla,” she wrote.
On another occasion, she said her husband was “too frugal” to wear a Zegna cashmere suit which it cost “only 30,000 yuan”.
Of course, it didn’t take long for such messages to reach internet users as well.
Versailles literature
Since then, critics have derided his publications, even giving them a name: “Literature of Versailles”.
The term, in vogue on the networks and inspired by the Japanese manga The Rose of Versailles (based on the luxurious life of Queen Marie-Antoinette in the eighteenth century) drew for months criticism of jokes among Internet users who imitate her style of ‘writing. .
A disgruntled internet user suggested a way to annoy a Versailles literary writer.
“Just pretend you haven’t noticed that they are try to bragZhihu wrote on the web.
There doesn’t seem to be an easy fix for the rich and famous.
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