Behind Buying: The Chinese Gaze on European Commodities.

Europe has become a popular destination for Mainland Chinese in recent years and shopping in Europe is essential and very exciting to most of them. While previous research has mostly comprised descriptive marketing studies, and a few have interpreted the shopping behavior of this emerging market from the traditional Chinese culture perspective, this paper presents a dynamic sociological approach to interpret the deeper mindset behind the Chinese buying by applying the theoretical concept of “tourism gaze”. A typical group, 17 white-collar employees and corporate elites in a Sino-foreign joint venture from a developed city in China, was interviewed, and thematic analysis was used. Three categories of mass commodity – functional goods, adornment goods and social gifts – were found to be the major items Chinese mainland tourists like to buy when traveling in Europe, among which functional goods for practical use are the most popular. The paper concludes that the deeper “tourist gaze” of trust and brand admiration upon Western goods is a result of the long Chinese modernization process and is very much influenced by the global consumer culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]