Understanding Consumption and Environmental Change in China: A Cross-national Comparison of Consumer Patterns

China's rapidly expanding economic prosperity has created a scale mismatch between increased standards of living for a large population and environmental distress at the global level. The potential size of an affluent Chinese consumer class magnifies the ecological impact of Chinese consumption. In this study, the emerging Chinese consumer market is compared with two other high-consuming lifestyles fashioned in the wake of economic scarcity; that of the United States after the Depression, and post-war Europe. The Chinese consumption pattern is found to currently follow a lower-consumption style, similar to that of Europe, but one that is based in an ideology of development through mass consumption, comparable to the United States. I further argue that this consumer style will change as the incomes and the buying-potential of the Chinese continue to expand creating a unique consumer pattern moderated by high population density.