ABSTRACT
China’s purchasing power is a topic that has captured the imagination of businesspeople around the world. An article in the Financial Times (7 November 1994: IV) illustrates the typical line of reasoning. Right now in China, says the article, the “ownership of ball-point pens averages only 0.5 per person. In the U.S. the figure is nine. If Chinese consumption were to reach U.S. levels, more the 10 billion additional pens would be sold.” Similar thinking has led to calculations about the number of phones the Chinese will use in the year 2010, the number of televisions they will watch, the number of cars they will drive, the number of oranges they will eat. If only the Chinese would consume standard products at levels comparable to the consumption of those products elsewhere, so the reasoning goes, then the factories and farms producing those products, whether in the United States or Europe or Japan or Taiwan or Southeast Asia, could go on producing those products forever. China’s 1.1 billion people, one fifth of the world’s total population, represent to non-Chinese businesses everywhere an untapped body of consumers with unlimited demands for the products that they make and the services that they offer.
