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The pink yuan: how Chinese business is embracing the LGBT market
Remember when the term “pink dollar” was first coined? It was one of the buzz
phrases of the 1990s: a time of much change with regard to views on
homosexuality in many countries. Lesbians were snogging on TV for the first time
in Britain. In 1994, Australia passed a human rights act that finally scrapped
the banning of gay sex. Meanwhile, there was a tornado of media coverage around
the world of this “pink dollar”, as companies realised that a more open LGBT
demographic was something they could lucratively market to.
Twenty years later, China is finally sparking its own pink dollar moment. Last
month China Daily, the state-run newspaper, ran a feature with the headline,
“‘Pink Economy’ set to soar as companies target LGBT community”. It claimed the
country’s estimated 70 million LGBT people represent a market worth $300bn per
year. In comparison, according to Witeck Communications, a company specialising
in analysing the LGBT market, the US equivalent is worth $790bn a year.
Homosexuality was illegal in China until 1997 but only declassified as a mental
health disorder in 2001. Now, due to increasingly liberal attitudes among young
urban Chinese, many big firms in the country market themselves as LGBT-friendly.
On the other end of the business scale, an increasing amount of startups are
tailoring their products and services for LGBT people to capitalise on this
change.
Zhu Qiming, chief executive of mobile game developer Star-G Technologies, which
targets gay gamers, told China Daily: “With rising social tolerance, people in
the LGBT community have begun to demonstrate their identity and meet other
members of the community through a range of social activities… I see strong
demand going unfulfilled, and that provides us with ‘pink’ opportunities.”
Last October Geng Le, chief executive of the vastly successful Chinese gay
dating app Blued, helped organise the first Pink Economy Innovation and
Entrepreneurship Contest, which awarded investment to new companies targeting
the LGBT market. “There’s a new concept of consumption upgrade offering more
tailored services,” he said. “For example, an LGBT person might use a normal
travel company, but if there’s an agency designing LGBT-friendly itineraries the
experience is better. Companies have realised there’s a gap.”
Meanwhile global firms such as Starbucks, Alibaba, Nike and Adidas have got in
on the act of marketing themselves as LGBT-friendly in China. Last year Alibaba-owned
shopping giant Taobao organised trips for ten gay Chinese couples to get married
in Los Angeles – gay marriage is not legal in China. “This is the other style of
business expansion we’re seeing,” said Geng. “They’re just showing their
attitude, really.”
Chinese state media regularly runs articles in praise of such attitudes, but the
progressive views lauded in newspaper columns are not always reflected in
people’s working lives. “A lot of Chinese companies like Alibaba, Tencent and
Baidu put LGBT-friendly messages on social media,” said Steven Bielinski,
organiser of China’s first LGBT job fairs, which began in 2015 in Beijing. “But
they haven’t necessarily done much when it comes to internal company LGBT
policies.”
There are no employment laws in China that specifically outlaw discrimination on
the basis of sexuality, and court cases based on such discrimination are rare.
Even in tier one cities, in which increasingly progressive attitudes abound, the
vast majority of LGBT people do not talk to work colleagues about their
sexuality. This year’s LGBT Community Report, which polled 30,000 LGBT people
across China, found that only 5% of participants said they told any family,
friends or colleagues about their sexuality.
Why is this supposed period of big market change not being reflected on a
similar scale in workplaces? Of the five lesbian, gay or transgender people
interviewed for this article about their work experiences, four said they never
talked openly about their sexuality or gender identification at work. They said
this was not a huge source of pain for them, just a practicality.
“I don’t want to risk it,” said Fei, a Beijing-based sales rep for a US-owned IT
company. “In my job there’s fierce competition, I don’t want people using my
sexuality [against me]. I’m dealing with government clients; I don’t want them
to have weird feelings.
Fei’s company has rigid policies against sexuality-based discrimination. “I do
feel protected by them,” he said. “And I feel like things are changing in China.
When I was at university in 2001 finding a date was difficult because people
didn’t feel there could be a future. I had a relationship that ended because the
guy had to have a sham marriage to a woman. It’s still a straight man’s world,
but the young generation is getting more international.”
Acceptance of homosexuality varies across different industries everywhere, but
in China the differences are more pronounced. Gang, a lawyer based in Shanghai,
considered the country’s most gay-friendly city, said: “Lawyers are always ahead
of the times. The cases we deal with often involve emerging issues in society,
so my colleagues wouldn’t be interested in something so outdated [as
homophobia].” Despite this view, Gang is not openly gay at work. “I don’t want
to bring my personal life up there,” he said.
Many people who work in less modern Chinese firms have to face more worrying
attitudes. Yuan, a lesbian woman, used to do admin for a firm that sold tea.
“Once an industry is labeled, people in that industry are expected to fit a
mould,” she said. “I suppressed myself for years.”
Yuan pretended she was married to a man to help hide her sexuality, and
encountered colleagues obsessed with the traditional heterosexual Chinese family
unit. “They would say, ‘You’re like a boy’ or, ‘I can’t imagine what your
husband must be like’,” she said. “One colleague said she planned to send her
kid to the UK rather than the US because ‘there are so many gays in the US’.
Career development was a concern – my bosses thought being LGBT was abnormal.”
Accounts such as Yuan’s make for pessimistic reading, but Geng thinks big
business LGBT support will gradually help shift the boulder. “There have been
arguments about whether companies use LGBT marketing as a gimmick,” he said.
“But whatever their purposes are, they’re making LGBT people more visible. It’s
a good thing, and the impact of the economy as the force of social progress is
beyond our imagination.”
Bielinski added: “There are perhaps hundreds of Chinese companies aware of LGBT
as a customer group. They’re still in the learning phase, but they will be
thinking about what this means for their internal human resources policies.”
Don’t call it a society-shoving revolution quite yet, then. But China’s pink
economy is undoubtedly becoming red hot.