Coffee and China

[Randy W]

Even China Post is getting into coffee. The state-owned enterprise, which operates China’s postal service, officially opened its first coffee shop in Xiamen, Fujian province on Valentine’s Day. (Photos: VCG)
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[Randy W]

Although there is some truth to the idea that coffee represents the epitome of the bourgeois Shanghai lifestyle, the early history of the city’s coffee culture is surprisingly complex. 

In the 1920s and 1930s, left-wing activists haunted the city’s coffee shops, sipping “proletarian coffee” and dreaming up radical changes to the social order.

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How Shanghai’s Coffee Culture Brewed Up a Revolution
In the 1920s and 1930s, left-wing activists haunted the city’s coffee shops, sipping “proletarian coffee” and dreaming up radical changes to the social order.
 

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The history of coffee in Shanghai can be traced back to the city’s opening to foreign trade in 1843. But it wasn’t until the Republican period (1912-1949) that the drink became a part of everyday life for most residents. In the 1930s, the ruling Nationalist party began promoting what it called the “New Life Movement,” which sought to teach Chinese more modern, healthier ways of living. Although the New Life Movement’s impact varied by region, it helped convince many middle-class Chinese families to adopt coffee as the last course of a formal, filling Western meal.

 . . .

But it was through the city’s numerous cafés and coffee shops that the beverage had its most lasting impact on Chinese society. In the 1920s and 1930s, a wave of international immigration led to a boom in cafés citywide. At first, Russian emigres fleeing the October Revolution clustered along the then-Avenue Joffre in newly opened cafés, including the famous Tkachenko Bros., DD’s, Renaissance Café, Constantine, and The Balkan. Then, beginning in the 1930s, Shanghai received tens of thousands of Jewish refugees from Germany and German-occupied areas of Europe. They built their own temples, schools, and stores — and opened numerous cafés in the Hongkou area, including the Delikat Café, Europe Café, Bataan Café, and Weiner Café.

 

 

 

[Randy W]

“Order, neatness, fashion, and good taste are the things that matter to the kind of young people willing to spend hours waiting in line for a cup of coffee... Still, it would be a shame if we forgot the stories of people who once called Forked Bag Corner home. They’re Shanghai’s true legends.”

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In a New Coffee Shop, Traces of Pre-Gentrification Shanghai
The grand opening of Shanghai’s first Blue Bottle café last month was celebrated with fanfare and long lines. Just 30 years ago, the spectacle would have been unthinkable.

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On Feb. 25, the 20-year-old California-based coffee chain Blue Bottle opened its first location on the Chinese mainland along Chang’an Road in Shanghai. That evening, I scrolled through the crazed reactions to the store on social media: pictures and videos of people queuing for eight hours to buy a cup of coffee, while scalpers offered to sell them cups for 300 yuan ($47).

Then I saw a message from my mother. It consisted of a short video made by a vlogger who had visited the store and an even shorter note: “Our old house on Chang’an Road.”

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According to the official history books, that transformation wouldn’t happen until after the founding of “New China” in 1949. Starting in the 1950s, Shanghai’s private enterprises were converted into “public-private partnerships” and integrated into a new planned economic system.

It was during this period that my grandfather joined Yutong. In 1962 he was assigned a residence at the mill’s worker dormitories on Chang’an Road: a single, small room for him, his wife, and their two daughters and newborn son. The worker dormitories were located in what used to be the Zhu family’s private residence. Built for wealthy merchants, rather than proletarians, they were characterized by a mix of traditional Chinese elements alongside baroque flourishes like Western-style crown molding.

By the time my grandfather entered the mill, Yutong’s transformation from a symbol of rising Chinese capitalism into a socialist work unit was well underway. A year later, the factory was renamed the Shanghai No. 3 Rice Mill, and one of its three dormitories was converted into the Shanghai No. 3 Rice Mill Children’s Primary School. The factories, residences, and school formed the kind of self-contained community common in China’s planned economy era. My mother was born in 1964, and together with her sisters and brother, they attended school just steps from their front door.

 

 

 

[Randy W]

iChongqing gets a little bit of help from Alex (just a little)

China's Coffee Market | Alex In The City Ep.19

Chongqing- Alex In The City "China's Coffee Market" Episode 19 In this episode, I share my experience discovering the booming coffee market in China. I also visit an international coffee fair in Chongqing, China. The Chinese coffee market has undergone an incredible amount of growth.

[Randy W]

Laners Cafe is a small space adjoining the entrance to the old red-brick terrace. A sign hanging from the door, which bears the slogan “come to ‘the tiger stove’ for coffee,” hints at its former use. When Shenchengli first opened in the 1930s, the building housed a “tiger stove” — a communal tap providing residents with boiling water.

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Shanghai’s Newest Tool for Preserving Its History: Coffee Shops
In Shanghai, historic preservation has often focused on sprucing up well-known landmarks. But the city is now experimenting with a new, more holistic approach.

A view of Laners Cafe and the entrance to Shenchengli, on Yongjia Road, Shanghai, June 26, 2022. Wu Huiyuan/Sixth Tone
 

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Shanghai has bulldozed huge swaths of its old housing blocks over recent decades, as the city of 25 million has transformed into a global business hub. Efforts to preserve Old Shanghai have focused on protecting famous landmarks like the Wukang Building.

But local authorities have now launched a new project to preserve Shenchengli, a cluster of traditional shikumen lane houses near South Shaanxi Road. Unlike previous campaigns, Shenchengli isn’t home to any well-known buildings; the aim is to protect the neighborhood — and the local street life — itself.

Laners Cafe is a small space adjoining the entrance to the old red-brick terrace. A sign hanging from the door, which bears the slogan “come to ‘the tiger stove’ for coffee,” hints at its former use. When Shenchengli first opened in the 1930s, the building housed a “tiger stove” — a communal tap providing residents with boiling water.

In those days, Shenchengli was a hotbed of revolutionary activity. The rooms that now host the area’s local cultural relic protection bureau once housed an underground Communist party cell during the Second World War. Many of the local stores were fronts for the operation, set up by the agents as cover while they worked to undermine the city’s Japanese occupiers.

 

 

[Randy W]

A festival celebrating coffee kicked off in Kunming, Yunnan province, on Sunday, attracting 140 coffee brands.
Yunnan, a main coffee-producing area in China, has seen its coffee industry rise in recent years. The province's coffee planting area reached 1.4 million mu (93,333 hectares) last year, official data showed.
The planting area, output and output value accounted for over 98 percent of the country, according to the Coffee Engineering Research Center of China. Moreover, the planting area and output accounted for 0.82 percent and 1.08 percent, respectively, in the world.
The province's coffee bean export hit 18,000 tons in July, increasing 2.3 times from a year earlier, according to official data.
China's coffee market size exceeded 387 billion yuan ($57.24 billion) in 2021, ranking eighth worldwide. The figure is expected to cross 1 trillion yuan in 2025 and 2 trillion yuan in 2030.

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[Randy W]

“In comparison to Italy or even the United States, China’s coffee culture is quite young. But we’re catching up fast: In the past two decades, the country has jumped from instant coffee to business chains — think Starbucks — to the current boutique coffeeshop craze.”

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How Accessibility Is Changing China’s Coffee Culture
The days when all anyone drank was instant coffee and Starbucks are over.

A barista makes latte art in Chengdu, Sichuan province, April 2022. Wang Lei/CNS/VCG

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In wealthy cities like Shanghai or nearby Suzhou, competition among these independent shops has reached a fever pitch, as COVID-19 drove down rents and convinced many to give up the 9-to-5 grind in favor of pursuing their passions. There were almost 8,000 coffee houses in Shanghai alone as of June 2022, according to local media. That’s almost as many as Tokyo and London combined.

The reality is, many of these new shops probably won’t survive the next bust. Cash-burning marketing strategies and the quest for internet celebrity may help some in the short-term, but they are not enough to sustain growth in the long run.

Then there’s the hidden risk facing the boutique coffee industry. If instant coffee marked the start of China’s coffee culture, and chains and boutiques were the second and third steps in its evolution, respectively, I think we’re on the verge of another transformation: boutique coffee that anyone can make.

 

 

[Randy W]

Starbucks plans to open 3,000 new stores in more than 300 cities across China in the next three years. It took the American coffee giant 23 years to open 6,000 stores since it first started brewing in China in 1999.

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[Randy W]

China first: The untold story of how Starbucks has cozied up to the Communist Party in pursuit of explosive growth
Starbucks says that China will become its biggest market by 2025. To get there, the company is contorting its values—and taking on significant risk.

 

 

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It’s estimated that a new Starbucks café opens in China every nine hours. There are more Starbucks stores in Shanghai than in any other city in the world. Schultz said in September that China will overtake America as Starbucks’s biggest market by 2025.

The Seattle-based coffee giant has been working quietly toward this goal for almost 30 years. It’s taken the usual steps necessary to operate successfully in China as a foreign enterprise, such as building rapport with Communist Party officials, setting up joint partnerships, and expanding slowly yet strategically. But Starbucks has gone much further in many ways than other U.S. companies have, even Tesla and Apple, whose CEOs have made headline-grabbing agreements with President Xi Jinping’s ruling party. (In December 2021, eight days after President Joe Biden signed the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, Tesla opened a new dealership in Urumqi, the capital city of the Xinjiang region, where the U.S. held that China was carrying out forced labor and genocide.)

Unlike companies that are merely building factories, hiring workers, and developing markets in the country, Starbucks is helping to cultivate the land itself—one of the few regions where it does so. It began testing beans and working with farmers in China’s coffee region of Yunnan in 2007. Since then, it has developed its own domestic supply chain and trained more than 30,000 farmers. It’s common for larger foreign entities to engage in charity and volunteer projects that include donating to Chinese nonprofits, but Starbucks’s support for Chinese initiatives goes well beyond the norm. The company is building rural infrastructure directly and operating its own foundation in the country. Early on, Schultz acknowledged that Starbucks had to “establish very strong relationships with government officials” to secure leases for cafés; corporate profits are also essentially now being used to help achieve Xi’s national goal of “common prosperity” in China.

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In 2020, Starbucks established its very own charity in the country, the Beijing Starbucks Foundation. Four years earlier, Beijing announced it would clamp down on international NGOs, subjecting 7,000 of them to, among other things, police oversight. Some chose to leave the country, including an office of the American Bar Association. The setup of Starbucks’s foundation represents an unusual arrangement for a foreign entity because it was registered as a local nonprofit with the Beijing Municipal Civil Affairs Bureau. While Western nonprofits tend to work toward poverty alleviation, education, and crisis relief, the Beijing Starbucks Foundation adds on a goal shared by many local nonprofits: dangjian, Chinese for “party building.”

 

 

[Randy W]

Coffee farm volunteer programs in southwest China's Yunnan offer young people across the country a rare opportunity to learn about coffee farming and production, and to explore rural life 

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Coffee farm volunteer programs enable young people to explore rural areas

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Coffee farming volunteer programs like this combine coffee tours with volunteer work, and they have become a new way for young people to learn about rural life in Yunnan.

"Although the volunteer experience is short, it is full of charming coffee aromas," said Yang Zhuoqing, 27, who is studying at the Minzu University of China. Yang learned about the program while doing field research in Pu'er and has since joined. "It is not only from 'seed to cup,' but also from 'cup to brain.'"

Pu'er City, famous for its ancient Tea Horse Road, wild ancient tea trees and Pu'er tea, has become the coffee-growing region with the largest planting area and highest output in China in recent years.

In 2022, the coffee planting area in the city totaled 45,267 hectares, with a coffee yield totaling 55,700 tonnes and comprehensive output value of around 5.05 billion yuan (about 730 million U.S. dollars).

"Many coffee farms now recruit volunteers to participate in the whole 'seed to cup' coffee production process, through which volunteers can learn about and participate in rural development through coffee," said Yang Hongjian, who was born in the 1990s and is the founder of the Yeyatang Valley coffee farm.

 

 

 

 

[Randy W]

Have you ever tried coffee with unusual flavors like Shanxi mature vinegar, fried dairy fan (a snack in southwest China), or egg tart? The five-day Lujiazui Coffee Festival in Shanghai, which concluded on Sunday, attracted more than 270 coffee brands worldwide. Coffee served in banana-shaped kettles and plunger-shaped cups went viral on social media.
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