China's supersized mall
By Robert Marquand | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
BEIJING – For sale: everything. Goat-leather motorcycle jackets, Italian bathroom sinks, hand-made violins, grandfather clocks, colonial-style desks, Jaguars, diapers. And that's barely getting started.
It takes about two days to explore Beijing's new Golden Resources Shopping Mall - the world's largest. Minnesota's "Mall of America" is 4 million square feet. Golden Resources, built in an impressive 20 months and opened Oct. 24, is 6 million square feet.
With 230 escalators, more than 1,000 shops, restaurant space the size of two football fields, and a skating rink - the Art Deco mall is a testament in glass and steel to the communist party's desire to create a stable, happy, middle-income consumer class.
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