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.

China's big appetite for budding sales combined with major loans from its highly centralized banking system is one form of the expression "market Leninism," used by Perry Link of Princeton University to describe China's hybrid red capitalism.