25 May 2005
China builds malls on gigantic scale
- By David Barboza New York Times Service
Dongguan (China), May 25: After construction workers finish plastering a replica of the Arc de Triomphe and buffing the imitation streets of Hollywood, Paris and Amsterdam, a giant new shopping theme park here will proclaim itself the world's largest shopping mall.
The South China Mall - a jumble of Disneyland and Las Vegas, a shoppers' version of paradise and hell all wrapped in one - will be nearly three times the size of the massive Mall of America in Minnesota. It is part of yet another astonishing new consequence of the quarter-century economic boom here: the great malls of China.
Not long ago, shopping in China consisted mostly of lining up to entreat surly clerks to accept cash in exchange for ugly merchandise that did not fit. But now, Chinese have started to embrace America's modern "shop till you drop" ethos and are in the midst of a buy-at-the-mall frenzy.
Already, four shopping malls in China are larger than the Mall of America. Two, including the South China Mall, are bigger than the West Edmonton Mall in Alberta, which just surrendered its status as the world's largest to an enormous retail center in Beijing. And by 2010, China is expected to be home to at least seven of the world's 10 largest malls.
Chinese are swarming into malls, which usually have many levels that rise up rather than out in the sprawling two-level style typical in much of the United States. Chinese consumers arrive by bus and train, and growing numbers are driving there. On busy days, one mall in the southern city of Guangzhou attracts about 600,000 shoppers.
For the moment, the world's biggest mall is the six-million-square-foot Golden Resources Mall, which opened last October in northwestern Beijing.