"Modern retail formats will outperform a traditional retail format, typified by hypermarkets cannibalizing street markets across the country," remarks David Hand, managing director of Jones Lang LaSalle Beijing, a real estate services and management group. The Chinese, he adds, have taken quickly to the new style: hygienic sales environments, large merchandise selections, overseas products, discounted bulk purchasing, strong global branding, and high-quality sales staff. And key growth categories include foreign hypermarket concepts, with all fashion categories - shoes, jewelry, watches, cars, and more - leading the retail invasion.  

The Emergence Of China
Over the past few years, China's export economy has become a near-obsession in the United States and in economic circles around the globe. Changes in long-standing­ trade rules have opened the floodgate for textile imports in the States, threatening to wipe out what remains of the American apparel industry. The United States, meanwhile, has been applying all the high-level power it can muster to persuade the Chinese to let their currency­ float to a higher level, making its exports more expensive.

But while Chinese exports receive the lion's share of the world's attention and dread, retailers have been studying Chinese consumers. And what they see is a world of new opportunities.

Just ask any economist.

Since 1980, the Chinese economy has been growing at an average rate of over nine percent a year, a bullish, generation-long economic expansion the likes of which the globe has never seen. Twenty-five years ago, Chinese workers earned a living on par with the people of Chad, in Africa. Today, income in China is five times what it was, and it's continuing in an upward spiral. With economic reform has come a new class of the well-educated elite. The average income of the top 20 percent of wage earners in Beijing is $3,600 a year - four times that of the city's poorest residents.