Overseas brands find favour as parents splash out on offspring

In the four-storey Lisheng Sports Store in central Beijing, a large photograph of Grant Hill, a star of the Detroit Pistons basketball team, looks over the counter selling the Fila sportswear he uses.

'These basketball shoes, at 790 yuan (about HK$735.17) a pair, are popular,' Li Huali, the counter manager, said. 'The teenagers watch the NBA [US National Basketball Association] on the television and want this model which Hill wears. If they do not, they feel inferior and their classmates laugh at them. So they insist their parents buy it.' The cost of the shoes is no small sum - equal to the monthly income of the average Beijing person - but parents are willing to spend it on their children when they spend as little as possible on themselves.

Last year, national consumer spending rose 6.8 per cent, the lowest annual increase since the austerity year of 1990, and individual bank savings surpassed a record of more than five trillion yuan, as people spurn spending today in favour of saving for tomorrow, for illness, retirement or unemployment.

The big exception is spending on children, according to a survey by Meilande Information, part of the State Statistical Bureau, which questioned 1,000 families with children between the ages of one and 12 in five cities - Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu, Xian and Guangzhou.

It found Beijing families spent about 764 yuan a month on their children, the highest, followed by Shanghai with 736 and Guangzhou with 697. Families in Xian, the poorest of the five, spend 207 yuan a month.

This accounts for 27 per cent of family income in Beijing, 29 per cent in Shanghai and 18.1 per cent in Xian, and translates into annual spending by children in the five cities of 40 billion yuan.