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WHERE
SHOPPING IS REALLY BIG
The
Olympics are not the biggest international show on China’s calendar. Bigger still is the World Expo in Shanghai
which expects to host an estimated 70,000,000 to 100,000,000 international
visitors. The event takes place in 2010 – same year as the Soccer World Cup,
which is hardly seen as significant in China or by China’s major economic
rivals in North America.
Trade – and
now shopping - are the big attractions.
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SHOPPING MALL IN BEIJING
Elegance and luxury to outshine Paris and New York - with all the best-known fashion houses competing for the most exotic displays.
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Shanghai
now has no less than four “shopping cities”, including one named Jiali
Sleepless City, to add to its four famous Shopping Streets.
Beijing
boasts an Oriental Mall – one kilometre long - where an array of state-of-the-art shopping windows display French and other
top fashion brands with an elegance and flair setting the pace for Paris and
Sixth Avenue.
The biggest shopping mall in the world, however, is a gaudy monument to
New Capitalism.in a city called Dongguan. Opened in 2005, the mall covers
650,000square metres, with wings to mimic Venice and the Champs Elysees,
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How can poor China suddenly afford this lavish consumerism? The numbers make it so. When only 20% of the Chinese can suddenly
afford to buy a few luxury goods, it means there are almost as many shoppers in
Asia as exist in the U.S or European Union.
National capital expenditure in China is lavish. For instance to cope
with people from about 140 nations attending the ow can World Expo, Shanghai already has the world’s fastest city-to-airport
rail system, capable of speeding at 500km as it floats above its ‘rails” to
cover 30km in eight minutes. The
state-of-the-art airport is immense – but it is not enough. Shanghai needs a
couple more. | |
Beijing has just opened the biggest airport in the world; a project
attracting more attention than all its futuristic stadiums and the Olympic
Games ‘city’ (which is stunning in its
size and concept). But the best superlatives belong to the new airport, built
by Britain’s most famous architects and by 50,000 workers.
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Beijing’s new airport is a three-kilometre, undulating tube, which
dominates the horizon. It is designed
to represent a dragon. It makes all five of Heathrow’s terminals, piled
together, look puny. We were among the
first passengers to enter it, on the day that Heathrow’s new terminal
opened. Later we heard of overcrowding
and chaos at Heathrow, but our experience that same night in Beijing was
precisely the opposite. As we entered the dragon’s belly we could only stand
and stare. The trickle of passengers on a vast marble floor looked like lost
ants. We stared at the roof, soaring above our heads and undulating into the
distance in a pattern of golden light.
Above the shuttle-train to Gate 19, deep inside the dragon, we sat on a
balcony, staring down on a tree, a pool, and a double-storey Chinese pagoda
among the customs-free shops. And above, far above, those golden lights of the
airport ceiling undulated their way to a dipping horizon. |
