On the Trail of Consumerism in a Booming Chinese City

Ted Koppel doesn’t actually cover much geographic ground in “The People’s Republic of Capitalism,” his four-part look at change in China on the Discovery Channel, but he seems a bit like a traveler who has lost his Fodor’s. The series ricochets so much — from big point to factoid to personal story — that it never does quite figure out where it’s going.
Yet that doesn’t mean it has nothing to offer. The transformation of China, at least in terms of consumerism, into a super-size United States has already been noted and thoroughly commented on, so this effort, an installment of the “Koppel on Discovery” series, wasn’t destined to be full of fresh insights anyway. But some of the tidbits that Mr. Koppel and his crew unearth as they focus on the booming city of Chongqing, in the southwest, are gems.
Part 1, on Wednesday night, includes an amusing game of follow the traveling couch as Mr. Koppel illustrates the economic interdependence of China and the United States. An Ethan Allen couch keeps turning up in the segment, in varying stages of completion, with some of the work being done in each country. Where the couch eventually ends up says a lot about both the economic push and pull between the countries and how a former archenemy can become an admirer. Part 2, on Thursday, includes a droll visit to some kind of dinner theater where the regimented entertainments and pronouncements from Mao Zedong’s day are turned into a kitschy show.

“To many Chinese these days, the Cultural Revolution is better mocked than too carefully remembered,” Mr. Koppel says. And in Part 3, on Friday, about China’s aggressive efforts to become a car culture, Mr. Koppel’s crew shows a fine eye for detail. Images of China’s public-works projects under construction have become familiar, but here the camera catches a woman hauling a bucket of dirt up from a deep hole being dug for a highway infrastructure. Her husband, we are told, is at the other end, filling the bucket — one couple’s back-breaking way of grabbing a piece of prosperity.

“There must be machines that could do this job, but conserving manpower is not China’s problem,” Mr. Koppel explains. “Putting hundreds of millions of dirt-poor people to work is. Any job that can be done by manual labor, is.” Part 4, on Saturday, tries to add more skepticism to the proceedings: political corruption, an overreliance on coal power and other problems are explored. But Mr. Koppel’s gee-whiz tone in the earlier segments — “How about that?” and similar interjections crop up — undercuts any attempt to sell this as hard-hitting reportage. It is what it is, as they say: moderately engaging observational journalism.