Beijing craft brewers add Chinese flavours as Great Leap, other microbreweries grapple with expat exodus

For Great Leap Brewing, one of Beijing’s first craft beer brands founded in 2010 to serve the expatriate community, adding Sichuan-style spicy chicken to the menu does not seem immediately intuitive – but Allen Lueth, the company’s chief executive, has his reasons.

“The dish goes really well with our beer,” he said. “It’s a big hit, especially among our Chinese customers.”

Like Great Leap, many of the city’s foreign-run restaurants and microbreweries that started out with menus catering to Western tastes are now shifting strategies and marketing to locals.

The change comes as the number of foreigners living and working in China has plummeted over the past couple of years, and continues to drop. Pandemic restrictions, geopolitical tensions, and an economic slowdown in China have all contributed to dimming job prospects.

Between 2020 and 2021, the population of expats in Beijing has fallen by more than 40 per cent to about 63,000, according to data from the American Chamber of Commerce China.

“Because of an exodus of expats, the addressable market for [foreign-run] businesses is shrinking, and competition increases,” said Alfredo Montufar-Helu, head of the China Center for Economics and Business at the Conference Board, a global think tank. “So it makes sense for the restaurants to recalibrate their strategy and address the demand of Chinese consumers.”

Across China, the number of foreign-born residents totalled just 1 million, or less than 0.1 per cent of the population, making the world’s second-largest economy one of the least international among its peers.

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