You probably noticed that the Chinese have been in town for the Christmas sales  – indicative of the fact that Chinese ‘retail tourism’ to the UK – has increased massively in the last half a decade. Further evidence of this is found in the following stats (mainly taken from this article)  –

• Both UK visitor numbers and spend are up 50 per cent in the past three years
• China accounted for a 109 000 visits to the UK in 2010 – and Visit Britain, a firm dealing with Chinese tourism to the UK is targetting 300 000 Chinese visit by 2020.
• Chinese holiday shopping now accounts for 15% of all foreign uk sales
• Retail spending by the Chinese has risen from £30m in 2007 to over £300m just three years later, according to Nigel Dasler at Global Blue, a financial services firm.

Behind these figures lies China’s phenomenal economic growth – which slowed to 9.1% in 2011 and is predicted to overtake the U.S as the world’s largest economy by 2027

However, when you look @ China’s GDP per capita figures – things get grimmer – the average is currently $2500 per capita compared to $36 100 for the UK (NON PPP stats!) – So it’s not as if the majority of the Chinese population are enjoying the increase in China’s wealth.

The increase in Chinese Tourism is coming from the growth of the middle classes in China, but more importantly where headline grabbing expenditures of ‘£1000 a head per visit in Harrods’ are concerend is the increase in number of dollar millionaires in mainland China – which is nearly 10 per cent higher in a year, to 960,000 (a small overall percentage in a population of 1.3 billion)

The headlines about Chinese shoppers saving the day for Western retailers don’t remind you of the increasing inequality in China – the income of the top 10 percent of the richest Chinese was 23 times that of the bottom 10 percent in the country in 2007, as compared with 1998, when the gap was only 7.3 times. China has a gini coefficient of 4.7.

It’s also interesting to note how this compares with increasing inequality in the UK – we now have a gini coefficient of 4.0 – greater than at any point in the last 30 years.

So if you look behind these headline stats, you get a much fuller picture of the nature of globalisation – yes China is growing, yes Britain is stagnating – but it’s only some Chinese that are getting rich enough to take part in globalised consumption – while their peers get relatively poorer – and the same is true of Britain – the rich are doing very nicely for themselves – while most of the rest of us –  get relatively poorer – increasingly lacking the capacity to take part in truley globalised consumption.