Society

Shoppers buy sneakers sold from the back of a Porsche sports car in Hangzhou city, capital of East China's Zhejiang province, Oct 19, 2011. The young man transported the pile of sneakers in his luxurious car and joined a group of street vendors at night, attracting a lot of attention. About 450 kilometers from Hangzhou, Wenzhou city, another Zhejiang province's economic hub, has been hit by a severe debt crisis with at least 80 business people reported missing, committed suicide or declared bankruptcy. Some people suffering hard times are selling their property to balance their deficit.

I caught the last three days of the prêt-a-porter season in Paris. It felt rather a novelty to be arriving fresh and keen while other fashion editors were visibly wilting and grumbling about the heat and overall lack of tickets due to the emergence of the all-important Chinese fashion pack.

Having just finished my third article about the rising importance of the Asian Pacific customer, I had expected to find perhaps some evidence of the startling statistics I've sifted through of late, such as Prada's 74.2 per cent jump in profits in the past six months, or Burberry's buyback of directly owned shops in the region, which accounted for 60 per cent in its recent 34 per cent rise in sales.

Seemingly overnight, China has become the biggest market for fashion brands, including Gucci and MaxMara, the latter with a whopping 300-shop presence in mainland China alone.

Then there's the opening of Louis Vuitton's new emporium in Singapore, which can only be reached via boat or bridge, a show of force by the French luxury giant as to where its loyalties now lie.

Or, the Chanel Culture "rolling" exhibition, soon to arrive in Beijing after making its debut this summer in Shanghai.

On the catwalks, around one third of all models in shows I saw were of Far Eastern descent.

Five people have been arrested in Shanghai for making and selling fake iPhones.The five were part of a gang who specialise in counterfeiting Apple products, The Guardian reports.

According to the police report, components for the 'iPhones' were bought from Guangdong in the south of China, and assembled in Shanghai; the gang was using a rented apartment as its "manufacturing" facility. The production costs were about £200 (2000 yuan) but the iPhones were sold on the black market for twice that price, still cheaper than the real iPhones.

Oddly enough, between the 200 iPhones found by the police there were several "hiPhone 5" handsets copied from leaked images and rumours surrounding the release of the iPhone 5.

Wang Jianping and his wife, Shue, are a relatively affluent Chinese couple, with an annual household income of $16,000 — more than double the national average for urban families.

They own a three-bedroom apartment. They paid for their son to study electrical engineering at Tsinghua University, in Beijing. And they are prodigious savers, with $50,000 in a local state-run bank.

But like many other Chinese families, the Wangs feel pressed. They do not own a car, and they rarely go shopping or out to eat. That’s because the value of their nest egg is shrinking.

Under an economic system that favors state-run banks and companies over wage earners, the government keeps the interest rate on savings accounts so artificially low that it cannot keep pace with China’s rising inflation. At the same time, other factors in which the government plays a role — a weak social safety net, depressed wages and soaring home prices — create a hoarding impulse that compels many people to keep saving anyway.