Fast-food companies are betting that China's taste for burgers will increase. It's no good for the country's health, reports Mark Godfrey.
It was presented as an accomplishment, something of evolutionary value to China's healthcare system, when Haidian No 1 hospital, in Beijing, announced it was incorporating a McDonald's fast-food outlet and Starbucks cafe in its new building. Then, last week, soul food took on another meaning when Kentucky Fried Chicken announced that the Communist Party has given it permission to open restaurants in Tibet, one of the few Chinese-ruled territories that has escaped Colonel Sanders's cheesy stare. KFC will be the first Western fast-food chain allowed into the Dalai Lama's homeland, which Beijing is targeting with heavy infrastructural investment.
Having appealed to young people with billboard adverts featuring David Beckham and other European soccer stars, KFC has become a fashionable venue for Chinese adolescents to spend their time and money in. McDonald's, a close second in popularity, has been trying to appeal to locals with endorsements from Hong Kong and Taiwanese pop stars.
KFC, which entered China in 1987, now has 911 outlets nationwide and plans to open another 250 a year. McDonald's, which arrived in 1990, has only 556 restaurants; it intends to open another 100 a year. Pizza Hut - which, like KFC and Taco Bell, another presence in China, is owned by Yum! Brands - has been expanding aggressively, responding to the country's new liking for pizza. China is Yum!'s largest market after the US, contributing a third of its profits of €300 million in 2002.
Clean, bright and warm, US fast-food restaurants appeal to China's growing craving for Western culture, food, sport and consumer goods. With their income rising every year, Chinese customers are not put off by prices that are higher than those at most local restaurants and fast-food outlets. A typical meal in a Beijing KFC or McDonald's costs 20 yuan (€1.90). A sizeable lunch of dumplings at a nearby hole in the wall costs four yuan (38 cent).
Customers come for the atmosphere as much as the food, though, and don't always spend a great deal of money. In my local KFC, on Tuanjiehu Lu, a tree-lined residential Beijing neighbourhood, students sit for hours doing homework over single helpings of burgers and colas. Young office workers sip coffee, another status symbol in modern China. A cup here costs a fraction of local Starbucks prices.
People's Liberation Army officers reserve tables to celebrate wedding anniversaries and children's birthdays while a Westlife CD plays in the background. Perhaps the restaurant's best customers are the grandparents who take their single grandchild for a weekly treat. The epitome of China's generation of little emperors, these spoiled and invariably pudgy children are also taken for fast-food treats by their other grandparents, not to mention their parents. Play areas and free toys draw the little emperors in.
At Beijing Number 10 middle school, in Fengtai, an industrial neighbourhood on Beijing's south-western fringes, students cite music, computer games and going to KFC and McDonald's as their favourite weekend activities. Some come from low-income households, but they manage a coveted visit at least once a month. Most of the 60 teenagers I questioned in one classroom said they went to a Western fast-food restaurant once a week. Several were grossly overweight; many students said they knew Western fast food wasn't very nutritious or healthy but said they ate it because "it's very delicious". Students at Li Ming Middle School, a private secondary school in the booming southern port city of Fuzhou, have deeper pockets and an even greater craving for Western fast food. The healthy school-canteen fare of seafood, rice and green vegetables is snubbed by students as boring; they prefer the spicy chicken wings of KFC.
Pizza Hut has just opened a two-storey granite-fronted restaurant in the city's central business district. Surrounded by palm trees, its size and old-style globe lighting make the new building look like a commercial annex to a five-star hotel.
Smaller, cheaper pizzerias, such as Pizza Town and We Serve, also do good business, but Li Ming students look upon them as they do indigenous fast-food chains such as Dico's and Chinese Burger's Home - below-par takes on KFC and McDonald's. And so they don't go there. Dico's and Chinese Burger's Home are like cheerful low-rent KFCs and McDonald's. The menus make concessions to local tastes: Chinese Burger's Home offers egg burgers similar to the egg pancakes sold on morning market stalls and supermarket shelves around China. Dico's and Chinese Burger's Home do good business, but neither draws a crowd like their big-name competitors across the street.
Fat profits for fast-food chains have produced fatter people and a looming health crisis, according to Junshi Chen of the Chinese Academy of Preventative Medicine. Childhood obesity has been going up by 9 per cent a year for two years, he says. "Chinese food consumption has changed substantially in the past two decades, alongside the rapid change in the economy. The richer the country gets, the more people want to try Western fast food."
China's first national campaign against obesity was launched in 2002 by the Chinese Preventative Medical Association, which pushed an awareness effort to highlight the health risks of obesity. The message didn't appear to get across, however, and last year's campaign was more muted still. The media have picked up on the story, with several of China's top-selling news and lifestyle magazines covering the issue. One weekly ran a photo of an obese boy trying to catch up with his much more athletic peers in a school playground, under the headline: "Help me, how can I keep up?"
Locals queued for hours when the first McDonald's opened in Beijing, in 1992. Wedding parties held receptions in the clean, well-lit restaurant, where staff were taught to smile. Smiling was another concept new to local restaurant staff. The enthusiasm hasn't wavered. Taiwanese and Singaporean chains compete with Western giants, and local operators have entered the fray with cheaper imitations of Western chains. A Chinese Colonel Sanders fronts Yong He Dawang, a 24-hour Taiwanese-run chain that sells beef noodles, dumplings and soya-bean drinks. Its shopfronts and livery are strikingly similar to those of KFC, although the colonel's eyes are much narrower.
Amid the fast-food boom there have been flops too. Popeyes Chicken & Biscuits shuttered its outlets and withdrew from China. But it is hinting that it may return with a new strategy. Subway, the sandwich chain, also appears to be struggling. It entered the market in 1995, but comparatively high prices haven't helped its efforts to teach the Chinese to eat filled rolls. The company closed one of its largest Beijing stores, at the huge Oriental Plaza shopping centre, near Tiananmen Square, late last year. Queues appeared when a local noodle-serving chain moved in. Subway, which has 28 outlets in China, says it plans to open 23 more in the next few years.
Taco Bell, which serves Mexican-style fast food, opened its first outlet in Shanghai this year. Church's Chicken, another US company, is opening in major cities later this year, and Quick, a Belgian hamburger chain, is said to be preparing to enter the market.
The Chinese have a saying: you should breakfast like an emperor, lunch like a minister and dine like a pauper. Their sons and daughters today prefer to dine like emperors all day if KFC is serving. Soon there may be too many obese little emperors.
