Eager shoppers flock to the great malls of China

DONGGUAN, China — After construction workers finish plastering a replica of the Arc de Triomphe and buffing the look-alike streets of Hollywood, Paris and Amsterdam, a giant new shopping theme park here will proclaim itself the world's largest shopping mall.

The South China Mall — a jumble of Disneyland and Las Vegas, a shoppers' version of paradise and hell all wrapped in one — will be nearly three times the size of the massive Mall of America in Minnesota. It is part of yet another astonishing new consequence of the quarter-century-long economic boom here: the great malls of China.

Not long ago, shopping in China consisted mostly of lining up to entreat surly clerks to accept cash in exchange for ugly merchandise that did not fit. But now, Chinese have started to embrace America's modern "shop till you drop" ethos and is in the midst of a buy-at-the-mall frenzy.

Already, four shopping malls in China are larger than the Mall of America. Two are bigger than the West Edmonton Mall in Alberta, which just surrendered its status as the world's largest shopping mall to an enormous complex in Beijing. And by 2010, China is expected to be home to at least 7 of the world's 10 largest shopping malls.

For the moment, the world's biggest mall is the 6-million-square-foot Golden Resources Mall, which opened last October in northwestern Beijing. It has already sparked envy and competitive ambition among the world's big mall builders, who outwardly scoff at the Chinese ascent to malldom, even as they plot their own path to build on such scale in China.

How big is 6 million square feet? That mall, which is expected to cost $1.3 billion when completed, spans the length of six football fields and easily exceeds the floor space of the Pentagon, which at 3.7 million square feet is the world's largest office building. It is a single, colossal five-story building — with rows and rows of shops, stacked on top of more rows and rows of shops — so large that it is hard to navigate among the 1,000 stores and the thousands of shoppers.

In Dongguan, the developers of the South China Mall say they traveled around the world for two years in search of the right model. The result is a $400 million fantasy land: 150 acres of palm tree-lined shopping plazas, theme parks, hotels, water fountains, pyramids, bridges and giant windmills. Trying to exceed even some of the over-the-top casino extravaganzas in Las Vegas, it has a 1.3-mile artificial river circling the complex, which includes districts modeled on the world's seven "famous water cities," and an 85-foot replica of the Arc de Triomphe.