Great mall of China so big you can probably see it from space
By Alexandra Harney  FT.com
Published: November 8 2004

At the Xiuya restaurant, a crocodile paddles across a plexiglass tank, blinking at the incoming lunch crowd. Several more of his kind are piled on a ledge behind him, their jaws taped shut.

"They're from Thailand," explains a cheerful hostess. "We had 13 of them originally but now there are six." The rest ended up on diners' plates.

Welcome to the food court at the world's largest shopping centre. The New Yansha Mall, which opened late last month, is part of the 550,000 square-metre Golden Resources complex in western Beijing.

Its scale is testimony to China's nascent consumer culture and its property developers' passion for re-inventing the great American-style shopping mall.

"China has a big population. Our shopping malls have to be bigger than those in the UK," says Fu Yuehong, New Yansha's general manager.

New Yansha is modelled on the great shopping palaces of the west, including the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, and the Arndale Centre in Manchester, England, one of Europe's largest malls. Chinese executives hired Atlanta-based Smallwood, Reynolds, Stewart, Stewart & Associates for the interior design. Shop tenants were recruited from Germany, Japan, South Korea, France and the US, among other countries.

In its first stage of development, the mall boasts 550 stores, seven cinemas, an ice-skating rink, a car showroom and space for 100 restaurants. An amusement park is under construction. Almost everything a consumer could crave - from treadmills and fur coats to Jaguar cars - can be found at New Yansha.

"It's a pretty tangible manifestation of a desire to be a retail utopia," says David Hand, managing director at Jones Lang LaSalle in Beijing, who visited the mall before its official opening.

For many customers yesterday, New Yansha was indeed a kind of utopia. The mall "is awesome", enthused Telly Wang, a 36-year-old trading company employee who took the day off to bring her parents to shop. "You can buy anything in there."

Mall managers say more than half a million people have visited since the October 24 opening, most of them from Beijing. But it expects to attract more visitors from other parts of China and from overseas, particularly as the 2008 Beijing Olympics approaches.

"We hope this shopping mall can be a symbol of China's level of development," says Ms Fu.

Many developers and local government officials in China share this sentiment. Lax lending practices and China's system of promoting officials, in which achievement is measured by economic growth, have helped spark a frenzy of shopping centre developments.

Another complex under construction in southern Guangdong province claims to be China's first "super mega mall". This rush to build malls - many of which are believed to be unprofitable - has been so rapid that Beijing in June announced measures to rein in speculation in the sector.

Indeed, despite its international ambitions, New Yansha illustrates how China's shopping mall craze is forcing developers to cut corners. Two weeks after opening, there are still holes in the asphalt outside the mall and Yogen Fru, the Canadian frozen yoghurt stand, has no frozen yoghurt.

And most customers seem to be leaving empty-handed. "It's clean, the atmosphere is good," says Wang Jinping, a Beijing housewife. "But I'm not buying anything today."