Luxe attack for China

[Lena]

i've heard somewhere that China comes first in the multi-billionaires list,
those are people that became rich selling cheap Chinese products to the West..

problem is Chinese workers work for close to nothing and live in polluted areas,
to make those guys millionaires and secure luxury's growth in China

of course this has nothing to do with Luxe arriving in China.. or maybe it has
exploitation.. ah sweet sweet exploitation

 

[yourbestfriend]

Capitalism at its best

 

[maverick]

First off, whoever said they "missed communism" is deluded; you confused the definition with that of socialism.

This has nothing to do with communism because its tenets never worked in China, signified by the failure of the great leap forward. Class separation of the urban and rural population, the hoku system, failed because of the Chinese people’s defiance -- they will stop at nothing to better their lives. Basically the PRC has been historically forced to change at the peoples will. Fill in the blanks to get to the thread topic (Extravaganza Shanghai 2005).


This is also a very interesting issue from an economics perspective; however I doubt anyone here is interested.

Also, most of the "information" in this thread outhers posted is incorrect.

 

[Lena]

This is also a very interesting issue from an economics perspective; however I doubt anyone here is interested.

oh no, I for one, i'm interested in the economics perspective maverick


plus, i'd really appreciate if you make clear what exactly you mean by saying

Also, most of the "information" in this thread outhers posted is incorrect.

please make your case clear ..much more since you are feeling erhmmm >>> ???????

 

[maverick]

oh no, I for one, i'm interested in the economics perspective maverick


plus, i'd really appreciate if you make clear what exactly you mean by saying

please make your case clear ..much more since you are feeling erhmmm >>> ???????

I would love to elaborate but it violates forum rule number two. Which I already did... I hope I don't get banned.

 

[mrrene]

Louis Vuitton in China

This Yahoo story ties in with Lena's post:

ZURICH (AFP) - French luxury fashion and accessory house Louis Vuitton is enjoying healthy growth in Europe, while doing booming business in China, its head Yves Carcelle said in an interview published by a Swiss newspaper.
"To the great surprise of many analysts, we are achieving at the moment spectacular results in Europe," he told the NZZ am Sonntag.
The group, which specialises in leather goods, ready-to-wear, jewellery and accessories, has just opened a new store in Zurich.

According to Carcelle 25 percent of sales are made in Europe and the same proportion in the United States.

But Carcelle, just back from a visit to China, said that 50 percent of sales were made in China and that was the focus of the company's attention.

In October it expanded its Shanghai store for the third time. Louis Vuitton, star performer of the LVMH group, has been in China since 1992 and now has 13 shops, mostly in little-known provincial cities.

"We want to penetrate the Chinese market systematically because that will allow exponential growth," he said. A second store with floorspace of 1,300 square metres (14,000 square feet) will open in the Chinese capital Beijing at the end of this year.

"And next year.... we shall open three or four more shops in China."
Louis Vuitton, which draws more than 80 percent of its income from leather goods and accessories, has in recent years diversified into ready-to-wear, footwear and watches.

"Unlike our competitors we produce these finished products ourselves and they are only on sale in our stores," Carcelle said.

In Europe, Louis Vuitton has 14 manufacturing centres for leather goods and accessories, a footwear production plant in Italy and watch factory in northeast Switzerland employing 60 staff. The company sells almost 10,000 watches a year, Carcelle said.

 

[softgrey]

thanks for the link maverick...

very interesting article...

 

[maverick]

in a way it does, since China is still supposedly a communist country falling softly in the hands of luxury.
of course it all started by the west exploiting China's ability for supplying the 'western' market with cheap mass produced goods...

for me, it's like this:
'we buy from them, we make them rich and then.. we go over there to take 'our' money back by selling them what they never knew.. luxury'

somehow its the perfect 'business plan' no?

i'd really love to hear the ideas of any chinese members on this

It does not work this way, this is especially evident in the case of the United States. The theory purposed by many economists is that the situation is a one way street towards China, a folly that will lead to the collapse of the United States as we now know it. Today, If China so wished she could completely collapse the United States economy; I see no change in this trend and only see its explanation to other states. Does this article mark a new trend with European states?

I can not say I am necessarily pleased with the ever increasing pattern of some fashion houses desire to increase their presence in China (production presence). My personal feelings are that is reeks of greed and dereliction of custom. Counter example BMW: they are building(built) a massive production facility in China, however the products from that factory will ONLY be sold in China.

i've heard somewhere that China comes first in the multi-billionaires list,
those are people that became rich selling cheap Chinese products to the West..

problem is Chinese workers work for close to nothing and live in polluted areas,
to make those guys millionaires and secure luxury's growth in China

of course this has nothing to do with Luxe arriving in China.. or maybe it has
exploitation.. ah sweet sweet exploitation

This is a rather crude stereotype and is also factually incorrect...


I had to retype this about five times (Backspace key deleted the entire post ) So at this moment I will not elaborate further.

 

[faust]

I find it sad to see communism fail again, not really exiting to me....

Space, the Chinese version of Communism is nothing to be nostalgic for, just read up on Mao and Cultural Revolution.

 

[kit]

Space, the Chinese version of Communism is nothing to be nostalgic for, just read up on Mao and Cultural Revolution.

[font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]The long march to evil[/font]

[font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]A compelling study of China's red emperor from Jung Chang and Jon Halliday exposes the true scale of Mao's oppression and genocidal manias, says Roy Hattersley[/font]

[font=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Sunday June 5, 2005
The Observer

[/font][font=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Mao: The Unknown Story
by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday
Jonathan Cape £25, pp832

During the first week of June 1966, pupils from a middle school in Beijing felt suddenly impelled to declare themselves part of Mao Tse-tung's Cultural Revolution. They chose to demonstrate their devotion to the Great Helmsman by painting a poster which warned his enemies: 'We will strike you to the ground and trample you.' To make their intentions doubly clear, they added: 'We will be brutal.'

Then, in a rhetorical flourish which was dangerously close to bourgeois self-regard, they signed themselves 'the Red Guard'. The youthful storm troopers of what was more a madness than a movement had acquired a name.

In Mao: The Unknown Story, Jung Chang and Jon Halliday invariably, and with absolute justification, refer to the Cultural Revolution as 'the Great Purge'. It so happened that the wrath of the Red Guard was directed against 'intellectuals', loosely defined as anyone who had any pretensions to learning. But the method by which they were suppressed - mass murder usually accompanied by gratuitous torture - was the same as that which Mao employed whenever he felt it necessary to strengthen his hold over China and its people. His entire life was punctuated with slaughter of such a magnitude that it could only have been ordered by a man who was criminally insane.

Jung Chang and Jon Halliday have not, in the whole of their narrative, a good word to say about Mao. In a normal biography, such an unequivocal denunciation would be both suspect and tedious. But the clear scholarship, and careful notes, of The Unknown Story provoke another reaction. Mao Tse-tung's evil, undoubted and well documented, is unequalled throughout modern history.

He was candid about his megalomania. 'Morality,' he wrote, 'does not have to be defined in relation to others. People like me want to satisfy our hearts to the full.' His heart was satisfied only by the domination of his people, a term which he defined so rigorously that, even when he was indisputable ruler of China, he still wanted to dictate the thoughts of its population to ensure that they never even thought of turning against him. He safeguarded his position by murdering millions of his innocent compatriots.

These days, it is fashionable to point out that Adolf Hitler had redeeming features. He was good with dogs and other people's children. Mao was hateful with everybody - his women, his wives and his son and daughter. Jung Chang and Jon Halliday deny him credit for the one episode in his blood-soaked career which, his apologists claim, at least adds an element of heroism to the savage saga: the Long March was a fraud.

After breaking with the Nationalist Movement, and fearing annihilation by Chiang Kai-shek's superior forces, Mao determined to take the Red Army to what he believed would be the security of the Russian border. In preparation for the evacuation, anyone regarded as unreliable was executed. The executions 'totalled thousands. The victims were hacked to death with knives and their bodies kicked down into a pit. When this pit was full, the rest were made to dig their own holes in the ground and were then hacked to death or buried alive'.

Accounts of that sort appear on almost every page of The Unknown Story, often describing tens of thousands or even millions of deaths. The purge of autumn 1934 was different only in so much as it preceded Mao's attempt to take 80,000 men and women (and his personal fortune) to north Shaanxi. When he arrived, his army was only 4,000 strong.

The Long March could have been ended almost before it started, had Chiang Kai-shek not given Mao a free passage to safety.

The marchers faced the daunting prospect of four lines of blockhouses. Yet these turned out to be no obstacle at all.

Chiang hoped to win the support of the warlords by convincing them that the Red Army was a threat to their powers. If that threat disappeared, as a result of Mao's annihilation, the debating point disappeared with it. So the Red Army was allowed to pass the blockhouses and over the Xiang river, creating 'one of the enduring myths of the 20th century.'

The stories of continual slaughter are so horrifically compelling that they enable the reader of The Unknown Story to ignore the problems of its literary style. To be told that 'by the beginning of 1948, the Reds controlled 160 million people' would normally provoke questions about who, why and where. But the narrative moves on to explain that, according to Mao, 10 per cent of the population were 'kulaks or landlords' and must be eliminated. 'Hundreds of thousands, possibly as many as a million, were killed or driven to suicide.' Inelegance loses its importance. The murder goes on, page after page.

Killing became an object in itself. When Mao decided to make the Great Leap Forward, which would allow China 'to overtake all capitalist countries in a fairly short time and become one of the richest, most advanced countries in the world', he had no qualms about 'driving peasants off the land and into factories', even if the sudden shortage of food meant that 'half of China may well have to die'. The famine which followed killed 38 million people in four years.

Meanwhile, Mao, with or without the support of the Soviet Union, was attempting to extend his power over neighbouring territories. Tibet was first courted, then occupied and subjected to the Great Destruction, an attack on the entire Tibetan culture which resulted in the death of half the adult male population. Mao was so successful in imposing his ideas on North Korea that the country's unofficial poet laureate wrote:

'Kill, kill more
For the farm, good rice and the quick collection of taxes.'

Mao Tse-tung died in his bed on 9 September 1976, according to The Unknown Story, unconcerned about his legacy to China and its people. However, 'Mao's portrait and his corpse still dominate Tiananmen Square in the heart of the Chinese capital. The communist regime declares itself to be Mao's heir and perpetuates the myth of Mao'. That sentence is the biography's epitaph and, more important, the biographers' stimulus to complete the 10 years of research on which their book is based. Perhaps 'labour of hate' is too strong a term to describe the devotion with which Mao is denounced. The Unknown Story means to inform. Its authors take it for granted that to know Mao is to loathe him. An 800-page philippic is not an easy read, especially when it is written with such an undiscriminating devotion to detail. But anyone who wants to understand the world should struggle through The Unknown Story. Do not expect to enjoy the experience. It is terrible proof that absolute evil can sometimes triumph.[/font]




Certainly worth a read .

 

[Lena]

maverick, trust me you wont be banned for not agreeing with me, thats a promise

now seriously, i totally dont get your points of 'critisism' to my post.. let me explain (english is not my mother -or father- language so please be patient)

trade has never been one street.. american analysts have been stressing the point 'dont feed the dragon' for years and of course they were right...
see by now the dragon is so well fed, the west is so much depended, lets sell them what they haven't (e.g. the luxury lifestyle dream) and starts all over again..
how can you have a problem with stating things the way they are? where do you see the inaccurancy ?

being pleased or not is not an issue, most lux companies have already transfered production to China actually they've been doing this for quite sometime, lux production in China is well under way now its time to start retail..take the invested money back

its only a normal clever way for Europe to react to how chinese products taking over our market.. we give you what you have not

 

[Spacemiu]

Space, the Chinese version of Communism is nothing to be nostalgic for, just read up on Mao and Cultural Revolution.

I know, I know, the whole thing failed, thats' what i'm saying, just another sign, to much corrution in the world. It makes me sad.

 

[Alpha Femme]

intresting, I supos they are going to be the 'next japan', in terms of luxry/fashion consumerism.

And what's wrong with that??

 

[Geowu]

In a certain way, despite the commercial perspective, it is easy to grow a sentiment of hate towards China. They have no respect for life. It's incredible. At the same time no country can make war with China, or force it to release Tibet. I find that China is being mediocre for threatening the use of veto power in the UN to keep Japan out of it. At the same time US doesn't support Germany. But aren't Japan and Germany the second and the third most powerful countries in the world?

 

[Alpha Femme]

This is also a very interesting issue from an economics perspective; however I doubt anyone here is interested.

Also, most of the "information" in this thread outhers posted is incorrect.

Well not all is wrong, some misguided people on this thread believes socialism and communism is a concept that works. We all know only free markets work, it's all about supply and demand nothing more or less. Any time you try to control a subject (people, markets etc.), corruption will follow. It's second nature for people to figure out a way to circumvent obstacles. I'm not saying capitalism doesn't have corruption, it does, but mainly in politics. You can't corrupt a free market, for example... take an American landscaper that charge say.... $200 a month for taking care of your lawn. This sound high to many folks and guess what? Here comes a Mexican willing to do the same thing for $130 a month. There you have it, a free market. The same goes for any corporations looking for an edge, cheaper labor means better margins. The luxury houses will do the same. Their interest is twofold, cheap labor and western pricing to the ever growing middle class in China with money to spend on western culture.

 

[PrinceOfCats]

Well not all is wrong, some misguided people on this thread believes socialism and communism is a concept that works.
We all know only free markets work, it's all about supply and demand nothing more or less. Any time you try to control a subject (people, markets etc.), corruption will follow. It's second nature for people to figure out a way to circumvent obstacles. I'm not saying capitalism doesn't have corruption, it does, but mainly in politics. You can't corrupt a free market, for example... take an American landscaper that charge say.... $200 a month for taking care of your lawn. This sound high to many folks and guess what? Here comes a Mexican willing to do the same thing for $130 a month. There you have it, a free market. The same goes for any corporations looking for an edge, cheaper labor means better margins. The luxury houses will do the same. Their interest is twofold, cheap labor and western pricing to the ever growing middle class in China with money to spend on western culture.

MARKET. FAILURE.

 

[Alpha Femme]

It does not work this way, this is especially evident in the case of the United States. The theory purposed by many economists is that the situation is a one way street towards China, a folly that will lead to the collapse of the United States as we now know it. Today, If China so wished she could completely collapse the United States economy; I see no change in this trend and only see its explanation to other states. Does this article mark a new trend with European states?

Can you elaborate on how the chinese can collapse the United States economy???? How about looking at it this way, we (the capitalists) collapse their political system by economic revolution, once their population get used to the free markets they will never tolerate the supression from communism. The socialistic european countries will fall on their own merits of promoting couch potatoes and non productive thinking to preserve their political seats. After years of buying their seats in power by promising welfare for the masses it will ultimately bankrupt their future. How do you expect for example, Germany to compete with China, India or Korea in shipbuilding, car manufacturing and other heavy industries with 5 weeks paid vacation and 35 hour work week?

 

[Alpha Femme]

MARKET. FAILURE.

?????

 

[PrinceOfCats]

?????

No offence, but you clearly are not an economist. The principal of market failure is probably the second thing an economics class would teach, after markets themsevles. You seem to be using a lot of economic arguments without really understanding what they are, which is making your reasoning very weak.

 

[faust]

No offence, but you clearly are not an economist. The principal of market failure is probably the second thing an economics class would teach, after markets themsevles. You seem to be using a lot of economic arguments without really understanding what they are, which is making your reasoning very weak.

not to mention that she sounds like she is stuck in some cold war bible belt mode of thinking.