China's supersized mall

For sale: everything. Goat-leather motorcycle jackets, Italian bathroom sinks, hand-made violins, grandfather clocks, colonial-style desks, Jaguars, diapers. And that's barely getting started.

It takes about two days to explore Beijing's new Golden Resources Shopping Mall - the world's largest. Minnesota's "Mall of America" is 4 million square feet. Golden Resources, built in an impressive 20 months and opened Oct. 24, is 6 million square feet.

With 230 escalators, more than 1,000 shops, restaurant space the size of two football fields, and a skating rink - the Art Deco mall is a testament in glass and steel to the communist party's desire to create a stable, happy, middle-income consumer class.

China's big appetite for budding sales combined with major loans from its highly centralized banking system is one form of the expression "market Leninism," used by Perry Link of Princeton University to describe China's hybrid red capitalism.

"From the beginning we wanted the largest shopping center in the world," says Fu Yuehong, general manager of the New Yansha Group, which operates nearly half the mall. Ms. Fu displays a huge map of the world in her office. "We are the country with the most people in the world. We have the fastest growing economy. The largest mall shows our progress as a society."

The "mall that will change your life," as it's advertised, sits in a forest of new high-rise apartments outside Beijing's third ring road. Many flats are empty, part of an overheated building spree. They stretch for blocks in a rebuilt district near Beijing's energetic "Silicon Valley," where most of China's ruling Standing Committee live.

The mall, partly done by the Atlanta-based firm of Smallwood, Reynolds, Stewart and Stewart, stems from the Communist Party's push for a "xiao kang" society, a term that picks up traditional Chinese dreams of prosperity - a car in every garage, a chicken in every wok.

Malls, those US-derived temples of consumerism, were once nonexistent in communist China. But they mushroom so fast today that even Premier Wen Jiabao warned this summer of a "shopping mall craze."

A half-decade ago, only a few dozen malls existed. Now a Ministry of Commerce study counts 400 malls in China, and a private sector study finds more than 500. The cost is between $24 and $36 billion. Shopping malls are seen as part fad, part pork barrel, and definitely one of a series of new big-ticket, semipublic "image projects" - something every self-respecting city argues for as essential for trade, tourism, and jobs. In developing China, that list includes airports, suburban townhouses, skyscrapers, golf courses, hotels, subways - all of which at one point were deemed a craze by officialdom. Beijing now has, for example, 24 golf courses - despite chronic public-water shortages.

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