The New York Times
Thursday, December 9, 1999
BEIJING JOURNAL
China's Chic Waistline: Convex to Concave
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
BEIJING -- Ms. Li, a 41-year-old entrepreneur, swept past the bevy of nurses at the Beijing Yingdong Sanitary Weight Loss Center, removed the jacket of her gray Chanel suit, primped her perfectly curled hair and stepped nervously onto the scale, all the while repeating what has become a mantra for many Chinese women: "I'm too fat. I'm too fat. I'm too fat."
She looked pretty thin.
A frequent visitor to the center, with a year's membership card, Ms. Li settled into to one of the 24 treatment beds, and strapped on a wide leather belt adorned with 50 metal studs, that looked like it belonged on a gladiator. A nurse in a crisp white uniform plugged the belt into a generator, sending current through 50 acupressure points on Ms. Li's abdomen, her latest attempt to melt away extra pounds.
"I was doing so well -- I lost 25 pounds -- and then I went to Europe and ate too many French fries, and the butter, and the cheese," said Ms. Li, who said she was too embarrassed to have her full named used. Dieting has become central to her life, she said, as it has for her 17-year-old daughter, who is also a member here.
Once a country of catastrophic famines, where a little extra padding was valued as a sign of good health, China is today obsessed with thin.
Glossy magazines are filled with only the skinniest of models and crammed with ads touting diet pills, diet teas and odd-looking weight-loss machines. Diet centers are springing up even in small towns and rural areas. At a time of economic uncertainty, weight loss is an exuberant growth industry: The Yingdong company has opened 10 centers in Beijing alone since its founding last year.
It doesn't hurt business that in a country now filled with temptations like McDonald's and Dunkin' Donuts, childhood obesity is on the rise.
While some are shedding pounds for health, most are pursuing a new notion of beauty -- sometimes to dangerous extremes. Anorexia nervosa and bulimia, once virtually unknown in China, have multiplied exponentially in the last five years.
"Every year there are more and more patients coming in, especially teen-agers," said Dr. Zhang Darong, a Beijing psychiatrist, who is one of the few doctors in China who treats eating disorders.
"Since China's opening and reform, the ideals and standards for so many things -- including body type -- have changed," said Dr. Zhang, herself a pretty if slightly stout middle-aged woman in a white lab coat. "Many people are paying more attention to self-improvement. The girls see the beauty contests and the ads for slimming drugs, and they absorb it all."
Dr. Zhang said that she now has more than 20 patients a year with anorexia nervosa and that seven or eight are so dangerously thin that they need hospitalization. Twenty years ago, she might see one patient a year.
In newspapers and on television, experts like Dr. Zhang warn young women that fad diets and pills can cause physical harm. But the diet industry is largely unregulated, and it is hard not to feel the pressure to reduce, with ads screaming everywhere that fat is bad.
"It's cold now and you will probably be shouting, 'I've gained weight!' as you step on the scale," begins a magazine ad for the May Flower Tea and Drug Weight Loss Package of 18 diet tea bags and 72 diet pills. And it explains: "In winter your weight is probably going up quickly and you look terrible."
Or consider another ad showing a skinny model sipping a herbal potion called "Slim and Pretty," which "works directly on fat cells to dissolve them." Or another, for the Jinyanduo Computerized Weight-Loss Machine, with its desktop terminal and various pads shaped like body parts, which ambitiously promises to "reduce weight, reduce wrinkles and build breasts."
"Chinese girls all think thinner is better," said Teng Lue, a 16-year-old high student in Beijing. "And fat kids are under a lot of pressure to reduce."
At the Yingdong Weight Loss Center, Liu Yufang, an attractive 22-year-old English-language student, is 5-foot-3 and weighs 110 pounds; her goal is 101.
"I always want to lose weight," she said. "Everyone I know is trying to be thinner, most are taking medicines."
The new frenzy with thinness is in some ways a strange malady to find in a country where older people still call a favorite child "little fatty," as both a compliment and a term of endearment. It is still the grandparents who take care of school-age children in most of China, and the eating capacity of their little charges is a generational obsession.
"When I was young, people admired and were even jealous of fat people since they thought they had a better life," said Li Xiaojing, general manager of the Yingdong. "Some older people still think pudgy is OK and fat is cute. But now, most of us, see a fat person and think 'He looks awful."'
Li Yifang, a skinny high school junior in form-fitting white jeans and a black turtleneck, said that she and her grandparents definitely have different beauty standards.
"They grew up around liberation," she said, referring to the 1949 Communist rise to power, "and they weren't even supposed to think about who was a man and who a woman, and nobody paid much attention to appearance."
"But now we have the living standard and the confidence and the time to think about such things," she added, "and there are so many pretty clothes to buy."
Many see the preoccupation with thinness as a sign of China's economic progress. The emergence of eating disorders is certainly a macabre milestone of sorts, indicating there is generally now enough to eat in a country where tens of millions starved in the famine of the early 1960s after the disastrous agricultural experiments of the Great Leap Forward.
Eating disorders are generally a malady of the developed world, and in China today they are, predictably, found mostly in the country's wealthy cities.
Dr. Zhang said that her patients tend to be well-off and educated urban girls in their middle to late teens. In most cases, she said, the diagnosis is made fairly late in the course of the disorder since there is still great stigma attached to mental illness in China. Many parents do not recognize eating disorders, and assume they can force their children to gain weight by cooking more or better-tasting food.
She attributes the girls' problems to a combination of the intense academic competition in Chinese high schools and the growing social pressure to be beautiful as well.
"At 14 or 15, these kids get out into society and they begin to feel all sorts of external pressures," she said. "And it's sad -- these girls come in so underweight and then they bring in advertisements for us to look at and argue that they don't have a problem."
