China and Europe Part II: Chinese in Croatia

In America, people I know don’t get excited enough about how cheap things are here.  It is unbelievably(!) easy, for example, to find new shoes for under two minimum wage working hours – a sum that currently stands at around ten dollars.

This was unheard of in the USA as little as two generations ago ( a generation being roughly twenty years).  And, in the former Soviet block countries and the Slavic Balkans, it was unheard of right up to about a decade ago.  Consumers had little choice in the products they had access to, and the best goods could still be found through the Black Market, like gypsy and smugglers bazaars in the border regions.  What you got was largely up to what was available.

The difference in consumer choice was visible in other goods as well, not just clothes – more plastics in the kitchen drawers, fewer new cars, old toilets, stained tiles on building facades – and this difference in appearance went a long way towards defining our vision of what a “Second World” country was supposed to look like.  Indeed, this was the case for decades.

After the fall of the Soviet Union when the Second World supposedly collapsed, the Second World was supposed to have collapsed as well.  Of course, nobody told the people in the Second World that.  The reverberations of a crumbling Berlin Wall did not shake money from the clouds to transform the Balkans and former Soviet Bloc countries into consumer cultures.

But the last few times I have come back to visit family in Croatia, I have felt more and more like I was in a town in America.  Cars are new, clothes are hip, building facades have long been stripped of white tiling and been replaced by more refined materials, and shoes are never torn at the toes.  It’s not that the Croatian economy is much better than it was ten years ago.  In some respects the opposite is true, since many of the government institutions that started off with so much promise after the collapse of Former Yugoslavia have become rife with mafia corruption.  It’s simply that Chinese goods have finally come to the Croatian market.

The changes in how consumption is perceived have changed as well.  There is no longer much talk of gypsy merchants and Bosnian smugglers.  There is little talk of getting something at a discount from a store because a friend works there.

Instead there is constant chatter about how so and so nice item was so unbelievably cheap, and – get ready for this – how amazing the Chinese are for being able to manufacture them so cheaply.  There is no stigma attached with Croatians to the “Made in China” sticker, but something more akin to pride that “Made in China” has finally made it into their country, as well.  It is no wonder that China Shops are popping up on every shopping street in the country.

(note: I am well aware that the First, Second, Third world nomenclature has been largely dropped from serious political and academic discussion but that’s not wholly relevant to this discussion, so don’t hold it against me.)

Thank you Phil Dragash for making your wonderful photos available to the world through Flickr.