8 Tania Lewis
been accompanied by the expansion of a range of consumption-oriented lifestyles
and consumerist aspirations, the so-called Asian middle classes often have
consumption habits and lifestyles that differ significantly from their counterparts
in the Global North, with the past decade offering a range of challenges to an
expansionary picture of consumer middle classness.
Chua Beng Huat, for instance, presents a rather different account of what
he terms “recessionary East Asia” from the usual picture of unfettered Asian
growth, arguing, that, with stagnating wages and growing income inequity across
the region, the middle-class dream, in “developed” nations in particular, has
largely come and gone (Chua 2016). While the 1990s was a period of economic
triumphalism in countries like Singapore—marked not so much by Shove’s 3 Cs of
“comfort, cleanliness and convenience” as by what Chua terms the 5 Cs of “cash,
credit cards, car, country club and condominium”—the 2000s, he suggests, have
seen a significant reframing of expectations around lifestyle and consumption.
Growing precarity means that “[i]n cities like Taipei, Singapore, Hong Kong and
Shanghai, there has been a re-focusing of the middle class on the necessities of
housing, healthcare and social security for an aging population” (Chua 2016).
He also reminds us of the fact that these Asian “global cities” are populated
less by an affluent middle class than by “a large poorly paid service class serving
a thin layer of the rich” (Chua 2016). While many of these workers have jobs in
services supporting consumption, with “wages are often barely sufficient to cover the
necessities of everyday life,” their own consumption habits are very different from the
so-called “New Rich” of Asia (Chua 2016). Similarly, even in the growth economies
of China and India, while there is much made of their burgeoning consumer middle
classes, “[a]fter more than three decades of rapid growth, the middle class in both
countries remains a thin layer, although numerically large” (Chua 2016).
Greening modernities?
[In] Southeast Asia [...] a different vision of the future is being articulated, an
alternative definition of modernity that is morally and politically differentiated
from that of the West
(Ong 1999, p. 29)Chua’s discussion of austerity and consumption in Asia complicates conventional
accounts of Asian engagements with capitalist modernity, pointing to the limitations
of one-size-fits-all developmental models. It suggests that, rather than viewing
the region as moving toward one inevitable end—capitalist modernity and its
associated carbon-intensive lifestyles—Asian nation-states such as China and India,
for instance, might be more usefully understood as being marked by “multiple
modernities” (Eisenstadt 2000). The multiple modernities paradigm assumes that
countries are shaped internally by varied speeds and experiences of modernity, but
it is also underpinned by the more radical concept “that modernity is not and never
has been the sole preserve of the west” (Lewis, Martin, and Sun 2016). For instance,
world systems scholars such Dussel (2002) argue that a narrow 200-year focus on