China - Kunming, a health obsessed city?
Kunming has changed much over the past 14 years. While in 1997 the retail highlight for us foreigners was a Japanese supermarket and no foreign fast food chain had yet opened a restaurant, today Kunming's growing middle class is foreign brand hungry. Grocery shopping at Carrefour, a snack at KFC, meeting friends at Ginko shopping mall to shop at Louis Vuitton and Dunhill. Despite this shopping behavior, the advertisements speak of a health obsessed Kunming. Wherever you look, there are hospital advertisements: pediatrics, proctology, gynecology and a hospital specializing on men's health. Is Kunming the health hub for the entire population of Yunnan Province? Is it that he repeated health scandals have given business opportunities to private hospitals, given that people don't trust the government hospitals anymore? Recently, government campaigns urged parents to get their children vaccinated. The vaccinations weren't handled well and resulted in many children getting sick and some even died, causing stronger mistrust in the government health system.
Here are a couple of impressions of health ads from a bus ride through Kunming. The writing on the bus outside reads along these lines: "Because we only focus on Men's Health, that's why we are more spezialized."
