A touch of glamour is returning to the Bund, the wide avenue with views across the Yangtze which used to be the city's main drag. In between the classical facades of the 1930s colonial mansions, some renovated by banks or by smart restaurants, the first Louis Vuitton store has opened. Coffee shops and boutiques are sprouting along the tree-lined streets with art deco apartment buildings that run behind the Bund.
It might sound a lot like Shanghai, the east coast metropolis with its own famous Bund whose revival has fired imaginations about China's economic boom — or more precisely, the Shanghai of 10 years ago. But it is actually Wuhan, one of the giant cities in the centre of China barely known outside the country — but which are beginning to develop their own thriving consumer classes.
If there is a single overriding consensus about the future of the Chinese economy, held by Chinese senior leaders and private sector economists alike, it is that China needs to rebalance its economy away from excessive dependence on exports and investment and to do more to boost demand by its own consumers.
Wuhan is one of the places where this seems to be already taking place. Economists reckon consumer spending on big ticket items starts to take off when incomes reach the level of about $3,000 a year (Dh11,019). While plenty of places in south and east China broke though that barrier several years ago, in the large conurbations in central China such as Wuhan that sweet spot for spending is fast approaching — Wuhan's income per capita is 18,385 yuan (Dh9,877).
The city is one of the group in central China that vies for the title of "China's Chicago", a hinterland centre for logistics, services and industry. The traces of colonial architecture date from its period as a "treaty port" when the British navy arrived in the mid-19th century. With an urban population of about 6 million, its traditional base is iron and steel but it now boasts car plants and factories making Hewlett-Packard computers. About 1,000km inland from Shanghai, it is also a hub for east-west river transport and north-south rail links. Indeed, the new Wuhan-Guangzhou high-speed train service — the fastest in the world, which covers the 1,100km distance in three hours — opened for business three weeks ago.
A decade ago, Wuhan's main retail area was a rough-and-tumble warren of streets and alleys near the river. These days it is not only the top-end designer shops on the Bund that indicate a new consumer class: the Wuhan Department Store Group recently broke ground on a huge extension to its "Mall City" which it says will be one of the biggest shopping centres in the world with 400,000 square metres of space.
On a bitter, blustery Wednesday morning, the mall still manages to draw big crowds but the brands are not familiar foreign names. The popular franchises on the woman's clothing floor have names like "Canto Motto", "OChirly" or "Masfor SU", brands that were formed in southern China by clothes manufacturers trying to move up the value-chain. They mimic the styles of Zara or Mango, with a few garish flourishes popular in the local market, but at a substantially lower price.
Foreign brands
"Maybe one day I will shop at those foreign brands — but I like the clothes here," said 26-year-old Wang Li, who works in the billing department of a logistics company, clutching a cotton blouse she just bought at BRJ (short for "The Best Raiment of Jauntiness".)
Wuhan is much less dependent on exports than China's coastal regions, but it has also thrived during the financial crisis because of heavy infrastructure investment, including the railway, which rose 35 per cent in 2009, according to Wu Minxu, an economics professor at Wuhan University. "The impact of the global crisis has been much less on inland cities like Wuhan than it has on the coast," he says.
The city has also benefited from strongly rising sales in rural areas — another feature of the Chinese rebound last year. Car sales increased by more than 50 per cent last year and one of the strongest sellers has been Wuling minivans which are popular with farmers and small businesses. "Sales are still strong for these vans and we reckon they could increase another 20-25 per cent this year," said Wan Zhixin, sales manager of one of Wuhan's Wuling dealerships.
"Consumption in China is really gathering momentum," says Ha Jiming, an economist at China International Capital Corporation, who estimates the consumption growth in recent years has been far faster than any other important economy. "This upsurge not only underpins sustainable growth in China going forward, but also contributes to global rebalancing." CSFB forecasts Chinese consumption will have overtaken the US by 2020.
Such a rosy picture is not shared by everyone, however. Some of the optimism about Chinese consumption during the last year has been due to buoyant retail sales numbers, which have increased by 16 per cent, but the numbers are disputed by many economists because they also include some wholesale and government purchases.
Retail spending has also been boosted by one-off subsidies — Wuhan is one of several cities offering incentives to buy white goods — and sales growth could yet taper off when these benefits are withdrawn.
Crucially, there are real doubts about whether China's economy is rebalancing. It has been one of the riddles of recent years that while retail sales have been soaring, consumption has been playing a shrinking role in the economy. McKinsey Institute estimates private consumption made up only 37 per cent of gross domestic product in 2008, down from 50 per cent two decades ago, and much less than the 71 per cent in the US or even 57 per cent in India. And that was before last year's massive investment boom.
Stimulus plan
"Consumption as a proportion of GDP has declined to levels not seen anywhere else in the world. This is the root of global imbalances," says Yasheng Huang, an economist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "The stimulus plan is probably only making things worse."
Better social services are one solution to encourage Chinese to save less, says Prof Huang, but he argues that consumption would only start to play a much larger role in the economy if incomes were to be substantially increased.
Developing economies need lots of new infrastructure but investment in China has risen to about 40 per cent of GDP — a ratio that is historically elevated even for Asian high-savings economies. If an economy were to rely too much on investment for short-term growth, it would run the risk of massive over-capacity, bad loans and sluggish growth.
"For the economy to rebalance, it is not enough to [increase] consumption, it means consumption should [increase] as a percentage of GDP," says Michael Pettis, a finance professor at Peking University.
Wuhan is evidence that Chinese consumers are finding their feet — but perhaps not quickly enough.
— Financial Times
