Mall openings in China are not for the faint hearted. So when Tesco opened its mass market mall in Qingdao on Saturday – the first of 23 big freehold malls the UK retailer will build on the mainland – it took sharp elbows to get through the throng of 50,000 shoppers who turned up.
Tesco's Chinese malls are the shape of things to come for the UK retailer. Many will include cinemas, some will include flats and home offices, and all will break the mould of foreign retail development in China: Tesco is the first foreign retailer to do freehold mall development on this scale.
The company hopes the malls will give it the edge in the increasingly competitive Chinese hypermarket world, with early entrants Carrefour and Walmart still far in the lead.