For people who remember the Mao era, the changes since then are stunning.
Designer duds and diamond-encrusted watches have replaced the baggy, faded blue cotton clothes that every Chinese citizen seemed to wear back then. Bicycle riders now dodge luxury cars.
And a young woman from Shaanxi province recently set a world record by paying more than half a million dollars for a dog. This makes the old epithet of "bourgeois" a quaint anachronism, laughably inadequate.
Nouveau riche Chinese are wallowing in what used to be condemned as "decadent Western materialism", and who can blame them? Certainly not a foreigner from America, a country with the dubious distinction of leading the world in decadent materialism.
But I'd like to warn my Chinese hosts about the painful consequences of rampant consumerism.
Television and advertising will relentlessly boost the pressure to acquire ever more goods. Success in life will be defined by how many expensive items one owns. People will judge each other, and themselves, by the labels on their clothes, how many accessories equip their cars and the size of their houses.
The price of acquiring such prestige includes sacrificing much of your time to the pursuit of money to acquire, display and house all these things. You become enslaved by your stuff. Its demands for more of your time, money and living space never stop growing.
Meanwhile, personal relationships fall apart. Nobody has time for dinner with the family, much less for friends. Everyone is too busy toiling for money.
Underlying the mad rush for more is the idea that more is always better. In reality, how often has more money, more food or more things solved problems for people who already have more than enough?
Yet the pressure never ceases and it's hard to feel satisfied, because there always are people out there with more. They are glorified in the media. Not having as much as they do feels like a personal failure.
In a consumer economy like America's, almost everyone's livelihood depends on constantly greater spending. Bubbles build and burst, and the economy lurches from irrational exuberance to a morning-after hangover of credit crunches, housing crises, joblessness and bankruptcies.
There is a way out of this. It's called "enough". When we have enough to be well-fed, adequately clothed and comfortably housed, we need the common sense to recognize that and feel satisfied.
Of course, it's easy to tout the virtues of self-restraint when you already have enough. China has plenty of room for acquiring worldly goods before the country risks entrapment by the "greed is good" mindset depicted in the 1987 American movie Wall Street.
As the government strives to provide material comfort for all, I hope the people of the Middle Kingdom find a middle path between the two extremes of deprivation and wretched excess. The sign pointing to that path probably reads, "Enough".
