Institute For The Future

Fear of the Chinese Marketplace

One thing I'm struck with in the interviews with Shanghai families is the pervasive fear of food and medical products. Many people we speak with talk about making things at home, never eating out, and only buying food in the supermarkets so as to avoid dangerous counterfeit products. Others simply avoid certain foodstuffs (beansprouts, river fish) altogether. Nobody I've spoken with has ever actually come across anything personally, or even knows anyone who has, but the media exposes spectacular fraud every day (e.g., the counterfeit egg story).