A generation ago, families buried their jewels in the backyard to avoid political persecution. By 2012, China had surpassed the United States as the world’s largest consumer of luxury goods. Though the Chinese had no nostalgia for the days of deprivation, they wondered how single-minded acquisitiveness might be changing them. A joke making the rounds described a man on a Beijing street corner who is sideswiped by a sports car, which tears his arm off. He gazes in horror at the wound and cries, “My watch!”
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