So many tuhao and dama in China today

Abstract

The last three decades have witnessed an increase in the number of middle-class people in China. Some of them spend money like water, have garish tastes and lack 'good' cultural traits and sophistication; they are called tuhao in Chinese (Cai, 2014). Others, in particular most of the middle-aged women, who are called dama, 'live a happy life with plenty of free time and money', investing in gold, bitcoins and overseas property markets and enjoying noisy square dances. (dama is a term coined by The Wall Street Journal) (Zhou & He, 2015). It was rumored around the end of 2013 that Chinese words, such as tuhao, dama and hukou 'household registration' would enter into the Oxford English Dictionary (Gui, 2013), which was still not the case when we searched the online Oxford Dictionaries for these words in 2015 (oxforddictionaries.com, 2015).