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Tightening purse strings in trying times

(China Daily)
Updated: 2008-07-31 07:35

Tang Tian, a 29-year-old executive at a US management consultant firm, is the poster girl of the burgeoning middle class in Shanghai.

A customer checks out shoes in a mall in downtown Nanjing, Jiangsu province. Middle-class consumers are getting more price-conscious with the cost of food and other necessities rising since early last year.[File photo]

Her career is assured and her salary has been rising at double-digit rates in the past several years. She bought an apartment two years ago, just before prices surged. Her apartment has already doubled in value, at least on paper.

But Tang is not happy.

Like many other young professionals of her age, Tang has caught the inflation blues.

To be sure, there is no sign of a massive cutback in consumer spending that could make a dent on the GDP. Being the favorite sons and daughters of the country's rapid economic development, the upwardly mobile urbanites in Shanghai and most other major cities are taking home incomes that are, on average, rising considerably faster than inflation.

But what these city-dwellers worry about is not so much an immediate erosion of living standards, as faced by many urban poor, but rather a nagging concern about the longer-term impact that surging global inflation may have on the country's increasingly internationalized economy.

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