Ruan Zhaoxia cannot recall seeing a single luxury brand in China’s inland city of Wuhan when she first moved there 14 years ago.
But by last year Wuhan had so many brand-packed shopping malls that it ranked first in the world for shopping mall completion, with almost 1m square metres of malls.
The mainland shopping mall market continues to boom, despite China’s economic slowdown and the woes of the property market. Though visitors to big Chinese cities are often struck by the sheer number of luxury malls — and the paucity of customers shopping in them — many smaller Chinese cities are still underserved with the kind of malls in which China’s increasingly demanding middle-class customers want to eat, shop and be entertained.