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China: The Consumer Revolution. By Conghua Li. Singapore: John Wiley & Sons (Asia) Pte Ltd, 1998, pp. xx + 246.
Since China started its full-scale economic reform in both rural and urban areas in the late 1970s, there has been a dramatic socio-economic change in the economy. Undoubtedly, the reform has enabled China to become one of the fastestgrowing and most robust economies in the world. Its gross domestic product (GDP) has grown at an average annual rate of 9.8 per cent for the past nearly two decades, and will grow at 8 per cent annually for 1996-2000 as projected in China's Ninth Five-Year Plan. It is expected that China's economy, the second largest in the world in purchasing power parity, will surpass that of the United States within the next 20 years. Accompanying and fostering China's rapid economic growth during the reform era has been the fantastic and amazing changes of its consumer behaviour and the consumption pattern, an aspect neglected by most China observers. Conghua Li's book is among the few to analyse China's changing economy from the consumer level. This is a timely contribution to the understanding of the Chinese consumer and its consumer market, an increasingly important driving force to China's economy.
This book begins, in Chapter 1, with a description of the social and cultural background of the Chinese consumer and consumer market, and concludes in Chapter 7 with a few prescriptions on how to seize the business opportunities in China for companies that are considering market entry into China and those that are considering market expansion within China. The core of this book is contained in Chapters 2 to 6 which are devoted to an investigation of China's consumer revolution, with a focus on the Chinese consumer's changing behaviour, lifestyle, consumption patterns and consumer trends. These are apparently the essential issues for any marketer contemplating a China launch or expansion.
According to Conghua Li, China's rapid economic development and growing consumer boom are caused by two major factors: economic reforms and social changes. As a result of the economic reforms, China's average family income has been rising dramatically. A recent Gallup poll shows that in the last three years, China's mean annual household income has increased from 4,380 yuan...