孔子拜师 错误:Western fast food changes Chinese DNA

Western fast food changes Chinese DNA

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The Western fast food industry in China, nonexistent just a few decades ago, has become an industry large enough to have an impact on the daily lives of many Chinese people. Though Western dominance of the fast food industry may appear imperialistic, Western companies interact with Chinese culture and interests in a way that makes the fast food more a product of China rather than the West.


Though traditional Chinese convenience foods have existed for decades, it was not until after China opened its borders that well-known Western fast food chains began to penetrate the Chinese market. On November 2, 1982, the first KFC opened in Beijing to a 50-meter long line of customers. First day sales surpassed company expectations, with sales reaching 2,200 buckets of chicken sold by the day’s end.


Though KFC foods were not affordable to most Chinese at the time, KFC was such an attraction that many still flocked to the store despite the prices. The success of this first store led to KFC’s expansion to other major cities in China.



Three years after KFC first entered the market, the first McDonalds opened in the busiest area of Shenzhen, a major city in Southern China. In the same year, Pizza Hut, another chain belonging to the parent company of KFC, Yum Brands, opened its first store in Beijing.


All were considered too expensive for the average Chinese person to eat at regularly, and so many patrons were foreigners living in China. However, the expensive price might have partly worked in the fast food chains’ favor. Western fast food was considered something of a luxury at the time and one that was in high demand.


It was not unusual for the average Chinese person to make an event of eating in a Western fast food establishment; some would even hold wedding banquets in fast food stores. This increased the image of Western fast food as being something special and desirable.

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In recent years, Western fast food restaurants are a common sight in the city streets of China. In 2005, KFC had 1,200 locations in mainland China and is currently China’s largest Western fast food chain. In comparison, there were over 5,000 KFC locations in the US.


At the time, KFC was growing at a rate of over 200 new locations opened per year, so it is very likely that there are around 2,000 KFC locations in China today. McDonalds placed second with more than 600 locations in the same year, and was targeting for a growth rate of around 100 locations per year.


As more and more Chinese enter the middle class, Western fast food is more affordable and is becoming accepted as a part of everyday life.



Just as Chinese consumers are adapting to Western foods, Western fast food chains are in turn modified from their US counterparts to better fit Chinese tastes. Food items at KFC, which include foods that do not appear on US menus, such as nuggets and sandwiches, are all flavored spicy or mild in order to accommodate Chinese people’s affinity for spicy foods.


At McDonalds, items such as red bean ice cream and curry beef triangles are sold alongside more familiar foods such as Big Macs.  Western fast food chains are not simply presenting foreign foods to the Chinese market. Rather, Western chains integrate aspects of Chinese foods into traditional Western fast food to create something that is not simply a product of the US. Western fast food thus appeals to Chinese customers because the food is not so alien as to distance the Chinese public.



Western companies have used clever marketing campaigns involving Chinese pop culture and language to increase their appeal amongst Chinese consumers. McDonalds uses Chinese NBA basketball player Yao Ming as a sponsor, who represents Chinese influence on US pop culture, and conversely, US influence on Chinese pop culture.

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Moreover, when the Coca-Cola company converted its product name to Chinese characters, it cleverly transcribed the name as Ke Kou Ke Le, which roughly translates to “really tasty, really fun.” (Rosenthal 2004) This furthers the argument that Western companies are not replicating the same strategies and products used in the US, but are creating a more unique Chinese product under a global brand.



Western fast food chains have had an impact on many different aspects of Chinese modern-day society. Because Western companies and products have had so much influence, it is useful to ask whether the effect these companies have had on China can be labeled as either Westernization or modernization. This question has been asked on a more general scale in Huntington’s “A Universal Civilization? Modernization and Westernization.”


Huntington describes modernization as a process that involves “industrialization, urbanization, increasing levels of literacy, education, wealth, and social mobilization, and more complex and diversified occupational structures.” Westernization, on the other hand, describes a process more akin to cultural imperialism: to Westernize is specifically to adopt the culture of the US and of Western European countries. Huntington then describes three different strategies that countries have adopted when faced with the threat of the West: rejectionism, Kemalism, and reformism.



In many ways, China has adopted all three strategies in different phases of recent history. First, the Chinese government adopted rejectionism and closed off the country from the rest of the world, but particularly from Western influence.


Though this application is not entirely accurate, certain aspects of Kemalism were put into effect throughout the Cultural Revolution, which was a systematic and traumatic attempt to erase Chinese culture and kin relationships from the daily lives of the people.


The recent history of China must be understood in order to understand why China opened up and adopted its current strategy of reformism, or the process of combining modernization with the central values, traditions, and institutions of Chinese culture.


From Korean Economy