Word: chengdu
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Wang Li may live deep in China's interior, in a city you may never have heard of--the provincial capital of Chengdu--but that doesn't stop her from shopping like the big spenders of Tokyo, Hong Kong or Shanghai. One Friday evening, Wang, 28, trolls down Chunxi Street, a jam-packed thoroughfare of flashing neon signs, McDonald's restaurants and boutiques, looking for the latest fashions she's admired in Cosmopolitan magazine...
...Chengdu. Although 1,000 miles from the glamour of Shanghai, Chengdu has a surprising number of choices for Wang and her fellow aspirants. As China's fourth largest city, it is catching up to the world's richest at a blistering pace. It has a booming economy, escalating incomes and 10.8 million people--more than New York City. Wooing the newly wealthy of Chengdu is a top priority for consumer companies from Coca-Cola to General Motors to Christian Dior. Chengdu is only one of several mammoth metropolises--like Chongqing, Wuhan and Xi'an--experiencing similar booms of investment, wages...
...decade before business really starts to boom in some of the secondary cities now being targeted?metropolises like Hefei, Harbin and Chengdu. But early movers such as InterContinental hope to reap the benefits of choice locations and greater brand awareness by getting there first. Eric Wong, a property-sector analyst for UBS Hong Kong, observes: "If I'm a big hotel company, the question is, should I wait ten years to plant my flag in China now? The big chains have all decided, and are in the midst of a flag-planting race...
...HSBC is sitting pretty. It boasts the most extensive branch network of any foreign bank on the mainland, with 20 outlets spread from Chengdu in the far west to Tianjin on the northeast coast. The bank has invested more than $4 billion since 2001 to buy stakes in Chinese financial institutions, including nearly 20% in both Bank of Communications, China's fifth largest bank, and Ping An Insurance, its second biggest life insurer. Compared with the same period in 2004, pretax profits in China increased sixfold, to $161 million, in the first half of 2005. As a sign...
...Litang festival, slated this year for Aug. 1 and lasting for five days, is one of the biggest and brightest on the Tibetan Plateau. Given that it's just two days' drive from Chengdu, capital of China's Sichuan province, it's also one of the more accessible of the summer festivals that take place across what was once the ancient Tibetan kingdom of Kham-a sweeping expanse of grassland now incorporated into Sichuan, the Tibetan Autonomous Region, and the provinces of Qinghai and Yunnan. Many of the thousands of Tibetan nomads (or Khampas)-swathed in fox-lined cloaks, their...