Global luxury goods producers are excited for the discovery of a "new land" -- China -- after Japan became the world's largest luxury goods consumer 15 years ago.

According to lately released statistics, the scale of the global luxury goods market had expanded to US$143 billion in 2005. A report of Ernst & Young International, one of the most famous four accounting firms, shows that China's luxury goods market records over US$2 billion of annual sales, and the figure is expected to grow about 20% annually after 2008 and exceed US$11.5 billion in 2015. By then, Chinese consumers will become as influential as Japanese consumers, and their luxury goods consumption volume will account for 29% of the world's total.

Prof. Wang Ning with Sun Yat-Sen University's Department of Sociology deems that China's luxury goods consumption might have hidden a kind of psychological uncertainty of wealth after getting rich quickly and an attitude of pursuing instant pleasure and not thinking of the future. Wang considers luxury goods consumption inculpable, and sometimes a positive attitude that stimulates the lower classes to struggle to join the upper class in some western countries. In China, however, since a considerable number of luxury goods consumers have become rich almost overnight, people consider that these consumers have made a fortune of dirty money.

In Wang's eyes, foreign luxury goods producers are too optimistic about the Chinese market. Actually, China's robust luxury goods consumption is merely a false boom which will not last. More importantly, China's social stratum has some rupture, and the class below the pyramid top has not expanded.
 
Editor: Yan