The Little Match Girl and the Fur Industry: Danes and China

Hello! Welcome to the How to Live in Denmark podcast. I'm Kay Xander Mellish. As some of you know, one of the other things I do for a living is work as a voiceover. And one of my regular gigs is with a Danish company that makes high-end microphones. Frequently they present their microphones to visiting customers from around the world, and my role is to be fitted out with 6 or 7 different microphones at once: a headset microphone like Britney Spears wears, and a necklace microphone like the ones on reality shows, a lapel microphone like newscasters wear, and even an old-fashioned tabletop microphone. Then I read a text while the company switches the various microphones on and off, so customers can hear the difference between the different models. When the customers are from China, I always choose to read a text from Hans Christian Andersen. Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales are extremely popular in China. So when I'm faced with a room full of Chinese microphone buyers, I usually read The Little Match Girl. The Little Match Girl, if you haven't heard it lately, is a very sad story about a starving little girl on the streets of Copenhagen in the 19th century. She is supposed to be selling matches to support her family. But it's winter and she is so cold that she keeps lighting the matches to keep herself warm. In the end, they find her small, frail body frozen to death on the street. So when I read this story strapped into 7 different microphones at once, I find that by the end these highly technical Chinese sound professionals are snuffling and sentimental, transported back to their childhood days. Hans Christian Andersen means a lot to the Chinese. Down by Copenhagen City Hall, there's a statue of the man the Danes call H.C. Andersen. And it's almost always surrounded by Chinese tourists taking one photo after another with the guy who wrote The Ugly Duckling. He also wrote The Little Mermaid, and the one time the famous Little Mermaid statue has been out of Denmark, it went to Shanghai as part of the World Expo. Denmark and China have a surprisingly deep relationship. Denmark was the first Western government to recognize the new Chinese government after the revolution in 1950. These days, China says Denmark is its top partner in Scandinavia, and the countries have a strategic relationship. Their leaders visit each other a lot. Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt was in China this week. And the 2 countries exchange thousands of university students every year. You wouldn't think it, but little Denmark and big China have much more in common than just both having red flags and a love for green technology. Basically, the Chinese are helping to keep 3 major Danish industries afloat. The first is the pork industry. Denmark has millions of pigs— more pigs than people. And its other big growth market, the Middle East, is strangely uninterested in its pork products. China is interested. Denmark sells about 13 billion crowns a year in pork products to China. The second industry is the wearable fur industry. You know, in parts of the U.S. or the U.K., wearing fur is controversial. It's sometimes seen as cruel. I remember when I lived in New York City, I once went to work in a fur scrunchie. This was the 1990s. And a colleague said to me, why do you have a dead animal on your head? In Scandinavia, fur is totally acceptable, as it is in China. As a matter of fact, in China, wearable fur is still seen as a sign of luxury. I was cleaning out my storage room last year and selling the stuff I don't wear, and I found a ratty old vintage coat with a fur collar. When I posted it for sale on Facebook, all of the interested buyers were beautiful young Chinese women living in Denmark. The girl who bought it put it on and looked like a film star from the 1930s. It looked a lot better on her than it did on me. Anyway, mink skins alone account for about 1/3 of all Danish exports to China. The 3rd Danish industry that China helps support is the Danish royal family. Now, some people in Denmark love the royal family, while others think they cost too much. One of the local newspapers calls Crown Prince Frederik Denmark's biggest welfare recipient. But the Danish royal family is popular in Asia. Businesspeople in Denmark say that when it comes to making a deal in Asia, bringing along a prince really helps. That Chinese mogul who didn't have time to meet someone from little Denmark? Oh, but the Danish Crown Prince will be attending. Suddenly, the mogul finds time for the meeting. Actually, the Danish royal family has another significant tie to China. The Crown Prince's brother married a woman who is partly of Chinese descent. She was the first Asian to join a European royal family. Her sons, who are 7th and 8th in line to the Danish throne, are the first people of Asian descent in a European royal line. Now, that prince and princess have since divorced, and she's been pretty much thrown on the junk heap, but that can happen to anyone. Look at Princess Diana in Britain. As an American living in Denmark, I have only one complaint about the Danish-Chinese relationship. It is almost impossible to find good Chinese food in Denmark. Denmark has good Thai food and okay Japanese food, but the only Chinese food available here is usually at greasy little grill bars in the bad part of town. So having lived in Hong Kong for a couple of years, I generally make my own Chinese food at home. So we have an American in Denmark making Chinese food. That's globalization. And that's the How to Live in Denmark podcast for this week. If you'd like to sponsor the podcast, please get in touch. We have about 1,000 downloads a day, about half of them from within Denmark. You can reach us online at howtoliveindenmark.com or on Twitter @howtoliveindk. The 2 is a number. And on Facebook at How to Live in Denmark. Don't forget our How to Live in Denmark book, which is available on amazon.com, saxo.com, and the iBookstore for only 50 crowns. 8 bucks, 7 euros, 6 pounds. Our theme music is arranged by George Glavis. See you next week. See you next week.