Peter S. Goodman has a cute juxtaposition in In China, Socialism With a Lifted Face (washingtonpost.com):

Once, Chinese mothers bound the feet of their daughters in the name of securing acceptable futures and making them fit brides. On this day, mother and daughter waited for an appointment with a plastic surgeon. For about $118 -- about half of their monthly household income -- he would stitch double folds into the young woman's eyelids, making her eyes appear rounder and, as current fashion dictates, more pleasing...

Forty years ago, when the plastic surgery unit at the hospital opened, it focused on accident and burn victims, soldiers wounded in the Korean War and people born with defects. So it went through the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s and 1970s, when female film stars wrapped their chests in sackcloth lest they appear buxom, which was tantamount to being bourgeois. Now the same white-tiled rooms of the hospital are used to insert silicone implants imported from the United States into the breasts of any woman with $2,500 to spend.

"Young people today accept Western culture," says Cao Yilin, who heads the plastic surgery unit at Shanghai's Ninth People's Hospital. "They think the breast is a symbol of the woman, so a woman without a breast is not really a woman." Moreover, artificially enhanced breasts have become a status symbol, an indication of an ability to afford the accouterments of a wealthy life. "Now, no one derides this as capitalist," Cao says. "In China now, the person who has money is seen as someone who ought to be proud."

A decade ago at Beijing's Plastic Surgery Hospital, nearly all the patients were actresses and entertainers, says Chen, the surgeon. They still amount to nearly one-third of the patients. Bar hostesses, concubines and mistresses make up an additional one-tenth, Chen believes. But now one-fifth to one-third are people looking for jobs and hoping to enhance their prospects. Of the total, a third are between 30 and 40 years old people who, Chen says, "have a lot of money and a lot of time." Ninety percent of the patients are women.