Abstract

     In recent years, consumer culture has become one of the most important parts of social culture. In terms of consumer culture, there exist obvious differences between China and America. At the beginning, this paper presents the definition of consumer culture briefly. Then this paper makes a contrastive analysis of Chinese and American citizens’ consumer behaviors from the perspectives of house, tourism and luxury consumption, together with the analysis of the possible cultural factors accounting for the differences. Based on the analysis, some advices for the healthy development of the Chinese consumer culture are also provided tentatively at the end of the paper.

Key words:  consumer culture; house; tourism; luxury

摘 要

近年来，消费文化已成为社会文化中一个重要的组成部分。由于种种原因，中美两国消费文化存在着差异。文章首先从消费文化的定义入手，接着分别从三方面来研究中美消费文化差异的具体表现，即住房、旅游和奢侈品消费。研究差异的同时，文章对产生差异的原因也进行了分析。最后，基于之前的分析试探性提出自己关于如何建设健康的消费文化的几点建议。

关键词： 消费文化；住房；旅游；奢侈品

1.    Introduction
Consumption is an economic phenomenon that exists objectively in human life, an essential link in the overall circulation in the process of social reproduction, and it is also one of the fundamental forces that can help stimulate national economic development. With the given economic and political background, ,when consumers have special needs of consumption for production and for life, and the corresponding behaviors have appeared, then consumer culture comes into being.
The early 20th century was key period in which American consumer culture transformed from traditional culture to modern culture. Due to the economic development, per capita incomes rise and payment by installments widely used, the United States completely changed from traditional consumer culture characterized by thriftiness, living within our means, and rationality, to the modern consumer culture, which featured hedonism and deficit spending.
In China, thanks to more than 20 years’ reform and opening-up policy, the economy has developed continuously at a high speed and the economic scale has expanded swiftly. In recent years, with the influence of western consumption options, especially American consumption patterns, more and more Chinese people agree with the saying that “high incomes, high consume level and high quality of life”. They appreciate and pursue the life style of consumerism. Although China’s per capita GDP is much less than that of America, the huge revenue gap has enabled millions of rich people to reach or even surpass America’s average level of real purchase power.