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Ancient Chinese philosopher Confucius(551-479 B.C.) said, “Your body, hair and skin are a gift from your parents, and you do not dare to harm them. That is the beginning of filial piety.”
However, the sage’s words have been brushed off by a growing number of prosperous and self-conscious Chinese people, who are willing to pay big money and undergo enormous pain to become more beautiful by going under the knife.
According to the International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons, China ranked third in the world in the number of cosmetic procedures performed in 2010, after the United States and Brazil, with 588,880 surgical procedures and 1.265 million non-surgical procedures performed in the country.
Considering that the industry was virtually nonexistent merely 30 years ago, the extent of current demand is testament to the enormous boom China’s plastic surgery has undergone in the past decades.
According to national broadcaster CNR, the total revenue of China’s plastic surgery market reached 300 billion yuan ($47.6 billion) in 2010 and more than 20 million people were employed by the industry. Extraordinarily, the industry has a projected annual growth rate of more than 40 percent.
Ups and downs
“Well-performed surgeries can totally change people’s appearance and their lives. For example, women who remove extra fat from their waists, hips and thighs through lipoplasty regain beautiful body curves, which gives them more self-confidence,” said Wang Shujie, a plastic surgeon at the Plastic Surgery Hospital at Peking Union Medical College.
The 46-year-old surgeon wears flattering black eye shadow and looks years younger than her age. She said that her own body has gone through double eyelid surgery, an operation to make eyes appear larger by adding a crease in the eyelid, lower eyelid surgery to alleviate puffiness and lipoplasty. She also conducted double eyelid surgery on one of her two elder sisters.
Wang, who has been a plastic surgeon for 15 years, said she spent a lot of time in front of a mirror when she was a child and was determined to become a plastic surgeon when she graduated from high school.
“When selecting a major for my studies in medical school in 1985, I had to choose oral and maxillofacial surgery, the closest thing to a plastic surgery major that was available at the time,” Wang said.
Apart from elective cosmetic procedures, plastic surgery also includes reconstructive plastic surgery, which repairs deformities or disfigurements caused by injuries, disease or birth defects.
Despite the massive popularity it enjoys at present, the development of plastic surgery in China has not been smooth.
Plastic surgery became established in China after 1949 to treat severely wounded and burned soldiers in wars. But it almost disappeared during the “cultural revolution”(1966-76), as it was considered an unnecessary technique. After the reform and openingup process began in the late 1970s, plastic surgery gradually revived and the industry has since experienced a boom.
Wang’s hospital, the largest plastic surgery hospital in China, was founded in 1957 by Professor Song Ruyao, who is known as the “father of plastic surgery in China.”Receiving his master’s degree in oral surgery from the University of Pennsylvania in the United States in the 1940s, he became China’s first professor of plastic and maxillofacial surgery.
The hospital was closed down in 1966-76 and reopened at a new site in Beijing’s western suburbs in 1978. After reopening, the hospital operated on a large number of cleft lip and palate patients. But over time demand for more complex and more cosmetic procedures began to rise and following the 1980s demand for plastic surgery expanded exponentially. The number of ward beds in the facility has grown from 24 in 1979 to 324 today, and around 20,000 plastic surgeries are conducted every year. The hospital has also opened two cosmetic clinics in downtown Beijing since 2001.
“Speaking from my personal practice, the two fastest growing groups of beauty seekers are young adults who feel they need to look better to increase their chances of finding better jobs and spouses and middleaged women who want to look younger,”Wang said. While plastic surgery has long been a woman’s domain in China, she revealed that more and more young men come to her for double eyelid surgery, nose enhancement and Botox injections for slimmer faces.
According to a survey conducted by the China Youth Daily on the cause behind China’s recent craze for plastic surgery, 71.5 percent of respondents believe that the primary reason is the excessive emphasis on a person’s outer beauty in today’s popular culture, 49.4 percent attributed it to the popular belief that one can change his or her fate by altering personal appearance, and 38.5 percent believe the culprit is the “too alluring advertisements.”
Wang said it is not unusual for a teenager to produce a pop star’s photo in her office and require looking exactly like the star after the operation. “I have to tell them that plastic surgery can only improve the appearance of one’s existing features, it cannot turn one face into a different one,” she said.
Risky operations
While some people manage to fulfill their dreams after plastic surgery, some beauty seekers find themselves having to live with results which can be a long way from their fantasies. China’s plastic surgery market remains under-regulated and many patients make hasty decisions or choose risky options, which can be life-threatening.
The tragic death of Wang Bei, a 24-yearold pop singer, as a result of a respiratory failure after a “jawbone-grinding surgery” in November 2010, focused the whole country’s attention on the dangers of plastic surgery.
Wang allegedly received the operation for a slimmer face. While she was having the surgery that would prove fatal, instead of waiting anxiously for her daughter outside the operating theater, her mother was undergoing the same procedure in another room at the same facility.
Without an autopsy available, an investigation by the Bureau of Health in Wuhan, capital of central Hubei Province, where the incident occurred, concluded that the jaw surgery caused bleeding, which blocked Wang’s windpipe and caused her to suffocate.
Netizens expressed concern and questioned why a girl as pretty as Wang would feel the need for plastic surgery. Her beauty had already made her a popular contestant on the smash television hit Super Girl, China’s version of American Idol.
“I hope the tragedy will raise people’s awareness of the slack supervision of the plastic surgery industry,” said an online post.
After Wang’s death, Zhang Huabin, a professor of plastic surgery at Guangdong Medical College, told Xinhua News Agency that as demand for plastic surgery soars in China, some doctors not trained in the field are carrying out plastic surgery, which is risky and irresponsible.
Li Qingfeng, head of the Plastic Surgery Department of Shanghai No.9 Hospital, said that the aspiring pop singer was killed by technical negligence as much as by an illregulated plastic surgery industry. He said that several other women also fell victim to deadly surgical errors in 2010, although they did not make the headlines like Wang.
At a conference in November 2010, Vice Minister of Health Ma Xiaowei said that during a random inspection on clinics and hospitals offering cosmetic or plastic surgery in a provincial capital city, fewer than half met national standards. He admitted that the main problems were unqualified employees and subpar equipment and materials.
Dr. Li said that the fundamental cause behind the surge of plastic surgery-related accidents in China is that medical schools and hospitals cannot produce qualified plastic surgeons as fast as the booming market demands. This shortage means that for many unscrupulous doctors, the plastic surgery has become simply a means to make money.
“In other countries, the study and training to become a plastic surgeon usually take seven to eight years while in China, some surgeons of other specialties receive just a few months’ training before they start to cut into people’s faces,” Li said.
Wang, the Beijing plastic surgeon, said that although the incisions made during plastic surgeries are smaller than those in most other surgeries, they require a high degree of care and precision. “Even the smallest mistakes during plastic surgery, although not fatal, could lead to disfigurement and thus lifelong psychological pain,” she warned.
According to Wang, there are a lot of patients who cannot fully close their eyes after eyelid surgeries, during which too much of their skin was cut. The necessary corrective surgeries are more complicated and expensive while the results are often less than satisfactory. “While it is easy to paint a beauty on a blank piece of cloth, it is not so easy when the painting has already been messed up,” she said.
Some of Li’s patients also fail to realize the risks associated with plastic surgeries. He said he often had to persuade patients who want to go home only hours after a major plastic surgery to stay at the hospital longer.“I tell them that this is surgery, not doing your hair,” Li said.
Besides unqualified practitioners, problematic materials and prostheses used in surgeries are also causing beauty seekers lifetime regrets.
In April 2006, the State Food and Drug Administration banned the production, sale and use of Aomeiding, a gel injected into the breast for augmentation purposes produced by a Chinese company, after it had been used on more than 300,000 women around China.
The administration found that more than 8 percent of users reported harmful reactions, which ranged from pain caused by the gel moving to other parts of the body to cases of women having to have breasts removed.
Psychological problems
“Being anxious and insecure people nowadays are trying to seek quick ways to success and many believe plastic surgery is one of the most convenient paths to success,” said Xu Kaiwen with the Psychological Counseling Center at Peking University. “It’s actually self-denial. Most of them do not recognize that they actually need psychological help.”
Xu suggests that people should be evaluated by psychologists before opting for plastic surgery, though this safeguard is always ignored given the commercial incentive for immediate surgery.
An even more extreme case of plastic surgery addiction reported in the media recently is a woman in her 20s from Nanjing, east China’s Jiangsu Province, who, starting at the age of 16, spent over 4 million yuan($634,900) on more than 200 plastic surgery procedures in beauty saloons. Born into a wealthy family, the woman never worked and once spent a whole year in the Republic of Korea to undergo a series of operations.
Unsatisfied with the results of previous surgeries, she chose to have more and more reconstructive procedures, which resulted in constant pain. During a check-up in March, doctors found that almost every part of her body had been operated upon, and some surgeries, such as wrinkle treatment, were inappropriate for her age. Doctors said that it would take two to three years of treatment for her body to recover while the full recovery of her breasts and heel bones is impossible.
Fei Junfeng, a professor at the Psychological Health Education and Research Center of Nanjing University, said that plastic surgery addicts tend to be extremely concerned about their image in the eyes of others, and often worry about the surroundings.
Many addicts keep coming back to doctors to fix so-called “failures.” “I have patients who started the conversation by telling me her eyelids had been ruined by her last surgeon even though I couldn’t see anything wrong with her eyelids,” said Wang, the plastic surgeon in Beijing.
Cui Qing, a public relations manager of Wang’s hospital, said that in the hospital doctors don’t operate on beauty seekers who are uncertain about what they need and ask doctors to recommend a surgery.
“All a surgeon can change is the appearance. They cannot add confidence to people who have zero confidence in themselves,”Cui said.
However, the sage’s words have been brushed off by a growing number of prosperous and self-conscious Chinese people, who are willing to pay big money and undergo enormous pain to become more beautiful by going under the knife.
According to the International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons, China ranked third in the world in the number of cosmetic procedures performed in 2010, after the United States and Brazil, with 588,880 surgical procedures and 1.265 million non-surgical procedures performed in the country.
Considering that the industry was virtually nonexistent merely 30 years ago, the extent of current demand is testament to the enormous boom China’s plastic surgery has undergone in the past decades.
According to national broadcaster CNR, the total revenue of China’s plastic surgery market reached 300 billion yuan ($47.6 billion) in 2010 and more than 20 million people were employed by the industry. Extraordinarily, the industry has a projected annual growth rate of more than 40 percent.
Ups and downs
“Well-performed surgeries can totally change people’s appearance and their lives. For example, women who remove extra fat from their waists, hips and thighs through lipoplasty regain beautiful body curves, which gives them more self-confidence,” said Wang Shujie, a plastic surgeon at the Plastic Surgery Hospital at Peking Union Medical College.
The 46-year-old surgeon wears flattering black eye shadow and looks years younger than her age. She said that her own body has gone through double eyelid surgery, an operation to make eyes appear larger by adding a crease in the eyelid, lower eyelid surgery to alleviate puffiness and lipoplasty. She also conducted double eyelid surgery on one of her two elder sisters.
Wang, who has been a plastic surgeon for 15 years, said she spent a lot of time in front of a mirror when she was a child and was determined to become a plastic surgeon when she graduated from high school.
“When selecting a major for my studies in medical school in 1985, I had to choose oral and maxillofacial surgery, the closest thing to a plastic surgery major that was available at the time,” Wang said.
Apart from elective cosmetic procedures, plastic surgery also includes reconstructive plastic surgery, which repairs deformities or disfigurements caused by injuries, disease or birth defects.
Despite the massive popularity it enjoys at present, the development of plastic surgery in China has not been smooth.
Plastic surgery became established in China after 1949 to treat severely wounded and burned soldiers in wars. But it almost disappeared during the “cultural revolution”(1966-76), as it was considered an unnecessary technique. After the reform and openingup process began in the late 1970s, plastic surgery gradually revived and the industry has since experienced a boom.
Wang’s hospital, the largest plastic surgery hospital in China, was founded in 1957 by Professor Song Ruyao, who is known as the “father of plastic surgery in China.”Receiving his master’s degree in oral surgery from the University of Pennsylvania in the United States in the 1940s, he became China’s first professor of plastic and maxillofacial surgery.
The hospital was closed down in 1966-76 and reopened at a new site in Beijing’s western suburbs in 1978. After reopening, the hospital operated on a large number of cleft lip and palate patients. But over time demand for more complex and more cosmetic procedures began to rise and following the 1980s demand for plastic surgery expanded exponentially. The number of ward beds in the facility has grown from 24 in 1979 to 324 today, and around 20,000 plastic surgeries are conducted every year. The hospital has also opened two cosmetic clinics in downtown Beijing since 2001.
“Speaking from my personal practice, the two fastest growing groups of beauty seekers are young adults who feel they need to look better to increase their chances of finding better jobs and spouses and middleaged women who want to look younger,”Wang said. While plastic surgery has long been a woman’s domain in China, she revealed that more and more young men come to her for double eyelid surgery, nose enhancement and Botox injections for slimmer faces.
According to a survey conducted by the China Youth Daily on the cause behind China’s recent craze for plastic surgery, 71.5 percent of respondents believe that the primary reason is the excessive emphasis on a person’s outer beauty in today’s popular culture, 49.4 percent attributed it to the popular belief that one can change his or her fate by altering personal appearance, and 38.5 percent believe the culprit is the “too alluring advertisements.”
Wang said it is not unusual for a teenager to produce a pop star’s photo in her office and require looking exactly like the star after the operation. “I have to tell them that plastic surgery can only improve the appearance of one’s existing features, it cannot turn one face into a different one,” she said.
Risky operations
While some people manage to fulfill their dreams after plastic surgery, some beauty seekers find themselves having to live with results which can be a long way from their fantasies. China’s plastic surgery market remains under-regulated and many patients make hasty decisions or choose risky options, which can be life-threatening.
The tragic death of Wang Bei, a 24-yearold pop singer, as a result of a respiratory failure after a “jawbone-grinding surgery” in November 2010, focused the whole country’s attention on the dangers of plastic surgery.
Wang allegedly received the operation for a slimmer face. While she was having the surgery that would prove fatal, instead of waiting anxiously for her daughter outside the operating theater, her mother was undergoing the same procedure in another room at the same facility.
Without an autopsy available, an investigation by the Bureau of Health in Wuhan, capital of central Hubei Province, where the incident occurred, concluded that the jaw surgery caused bleeding, which blocked Wang’s windpipe and caused her to suffocate.
Netizens expressed concern and questioned why a girl as pretty as Wang would feel the need for plastic surgery. Her beauty had already made her a popular contestant on the smash television hit Super Girl, China’s version of American Idol.
“I hope the tragedy will raise people’s awareness of the slack supervision of the plastic surgery industry,” said an online post.
After Wang’s death, Zhang Huabin, a professor of plastic surgery at Guangdong Medical College, told Xinhua News Agency that as demand for plastic surgery soars in China, some doctors not trained in the field are carrying out plastic surgery, which is risky and irresponsible.
Li Qingfeng, head of the Plastic Surgery Department of Shanghai No.9 Hospital, said that the aspiring pop singer was killed by technical negligence as much as by an illregulated plastic surgery industry. He said that several other women also fell victim to deadly surgical errors in 2010, although they did not make the headlines like Wang.
At a conference in November 2010, Vice Minister of Health Ma Xiaowei said that during a random inspection on clinics and hospitals offering cosmetic or plastic surgery in a provincial capital city, fewer than half met national standards. He admitted that the main problems were unqualified employees and subpar equipment and materials.
Dr. Li said that the fundamental cause behind the surge of plastic surgery-related accidents in China is that medical schools and hospitals cannot produce qualified plastic surgeons as fast as the booming market demands. This shortage means that for many unscrupulous doctors, the plastic surgery has become simply a means to make money.
“In other countries, the study and training to become a plastic surgeon usually take seven to eight years while in China, some surgeons of other specialties receive just a few months’ training before they start to cut into people’s faces,” Li said.
Wang, the Beijing plastic surgeon, said that although the incisions made during plastic surgeries are smaller than those in most other surgeries, they require a high degree of care and precision. “Even the smallest mistakes during plastic surgery, although not fatal, could lead to disfigurement and thus lifelong psychological pain,” she warned.
According to Wang, there are a lot of patients who cannot fully close their eyes after eyelid surgeries, during which too much of their skin was cut. The necessary corrective surgeries are more complicated and expensive while the results are often less than satisfactory. “While it is easy to paint a beauty on a blank piece of cloth, it is not so easy when the painting has already been messed up,” she said.
Some of Li’s patients also fail to realize the risks associated with plastic surgeries. He said he often had to persuade patients who want to go home only hours after a major plastic surgery to stay at the hospital longer.“I tell them that this is surgery, not doing your hair,” Li said.
Besides unqualified practitioners, problematic materials and prostheses used in surgeries are also causing beauty seekers lifetime regrets.
In April 2006, the State Food and Drug Administration banned the production, sale and use of Aomeiding, a gel injected into the breast for augmentation purposes produced by a Chinese company, after it had been used on more than 300,000 women around China.
The administration found that more than 8 percent of users reported harmful reactions, which ranged from pain caused by the gel moving to other parts of the body to cases of women having to have breasts removed.
Psychological problems
“Being anxious and insecure people nowadays are trying to seek quick ways to success and many believe plastic surgery is one of the most convenient paths to success,” said Xu Kaiwen with the Psychological Counseling Center at Peking University. “It’s actually self-denial. Most of them do not recognize that they actually need psychological help.”
Xu suggests that people should be evaluated by psychologists before opting for plastic surgery, though this safeguard is always ignored given the commercial incentive for immediate surgery.
An even more extreme case of plastic surgery addiction reported in the media recently is a woman in her 20s from Nanjing, east China’s Jiangsu Province, who, starting at the age of 16, spent over 4 million yuan($634,900) on more than 200 plastic surgery procedures in beauty saloons. Born into a wealthy family, the woman never worked and once spent a whole year in the Republic of Korea to undergo a series of operations.
Unsatisfied with the results of previous surgeries, she chose to have more and more reconstructive procedures, which resulted in constant pain. During a check-up in March, doctors found that almost every part of her body had been operated upon, and some surgeries, such as wrinkle treatment, were inappropriate for her age. Doctors said that it would take two to three years of treatment for her body to recover while the full recovery of her breasts and heel bones is impossible.
Fei Junfeng, a professor at the Psychological Health Education and Research Center of Nanjing University, said that plastic surgery addicts tend to be extremely concerned about their image in the eyes of others, and often worry about the surroundings.
Many addicts keep coming back to doctors to fix so-called “failures.” “I have patients who started the conversation by telling me her eyelids had been ruined by her last surgeon even though I couldn’t see anything wrong with her eyelids,” said Wang, the plastic surgeon in Beijing.
Cui Qing, a public relations manager of Wang’s hospital, said that in the hospital doctors don’t operate on beauty seekers who are uncertain about what they need and ask doctors to recommend a surgery.
“All a surgeon can change is the appearance. They cannot add confidence to people who have zero confidence in themselves,”Cui said.