After one week in China, you’re an expert. After one year, you have a vague idea of how things work. After ten years, you realise you know nothing—so the saying goes. I moved to China ten years ago, spending my first year in Kunshan, a county-level city in Jiangsu province, before moving to Shanghai. I spent many weekends travelling to third- and fourth-tier cities in the surrounding area—mostly by public bus. In the summer of 2025, I completed a 60-day, solo trek to 30 cities across China, second-tier and below, almost entirely by high-speed train. Not even halfway through, it was clear: a decade after my first year in Kunshan, the transformation of China’s lower-tier cities is distinctly different from the growth of tier-one cities like Shanghai, Beijing, and Guangzhou. This divergence exposes the limits of the playbooks global brands bring to China, and the nuances that often don’t show up in a dashboard or data set.
Visiting 30 cities in the span of 60 days felt like participating in an ultramarathon (every day, for two months). Physical and logistical obstacles aside, my goal was to gather as many touchpoints across the country as possible to understand how consumption differs outside of first-tier cities. To ensure comparable data, I followed a consistent methodology in each city. This included visiting one of the dominant shopping destinations (usually a MixC property), sometimes at multiple times throughout the day, to observe brands and foot traffic.
A decade ago, Wanda shopping centres, such as Wanda Plaza, were all the rage in lower-tier cities. Newly constructed, enormous monuments of China’s boom era—foreign brands like Zara, H&M, Nike, and KFC felt like the main attraction. These malls catered to the mass market, and openings numbered in the hundreds across the country. Today, many of the Wanda shopping malls I encountered were run down at best, and at worst, half-vacated. In Kunming, I walked through a nearly abandoned Wanda where only a small Watson's drugstore remained operational on the ground floor. The main hallway had been repurposed for children's roller-skating lessons.
In the majority of cities I visited, MixC malls—positioned as the premium alternative to Wanda—have become popular shopping destinations. Though their footprint is considerably smaller (just under 100 stores nationwide compared to Wanda's empire), MixC is expanding while competitors restructure and close.
From Ganzhou to Lanzhou, the MixC experience in 2nd-tier cities and below has several defining characteristics:
First-floor dominance of Chinese brands
Chinese brands command real estate from the moment you walk into a MixC. In MixC locations I visited, ground floors featured Chinese EV brands, premium Chinese sportswear and fashion brands, Chinese toy brand Pop Mart, and a plethora of Chinese milk tea brands.
EV brands were among the most striking examples of the rapid rise of Chinese brand dominance. Most MixC locations were home to anywhere between 5-14 EV brands, with stores one after another and display cars filling the corridors. Tesla stood out as the only non-Chinese presence. Crowds gathered around the EVs, attracted by government subsidies and incentives as well as the bold colours, sleek, futuristic designs and tech-enabled interiors.
It isn’t just Chinese EV brands that have captured offline space in China’s premium malls; it’s Chinese sports and outdoor brands as well. In addition to the well-established Chinese sportswear brands like Li Ning and Anta, more high-end outdoor brands such as Bosideng and even newer brands like Kailas and Beneunder have opened locations across many 2nd and third-tier cities.
Big names and big (empty) spaces
MixC locations drew evening crowds, but that foot traffic was concentrated in just a handful of stores. For most brands, their offline footprint appeared to be just that, a claim to space and not much more. Like billboards on a highway with pedestrians funnelling by, most stores were strikingly empty. I rarely saw customers inside Nike or Adidas. Even rising niche brands such as Hoka and Salomon, which have both posted strong growth on e-commerce channels and have an impressive number of stores in second and third-tier cities, often had sales staff who paced idly from one end of the store to another for the entire evening. This issue didn’t just plague foreign brands—Li Ning, Anta, and Kailas were just as empty. Among the sportswear brands, ON and Lululemon were the only two I could count on to have any significant foot traffic.
The exceptions: Stores that had actual customers
Pop Mart locations were always crowded, and even the Pop Mart vending machines usually had customers. From toddlers to grandpas, customers of all ages huddled over boxes, vigorously shaking to determine which character is inside. Little kids demanded for ‘Labubu’ even though no store had any Labubu’s in stock.
Crocs was another outlier in that its locations often attracted a noticeable number of customers—especially those engaged in picking out different Jibbitz to customise their shoes.
Most MixC locations would have numerous milk tea brands, spanning multiple levels of the mall. From afternoon until closing most seemed to be operating at full capacity. Employees would be engaged in a never-ending, methodical dance of filling cups with different concoctions from large pitchers and passing them on to be sealed and packaged. Orders were swooped away by delivery drivers or patient customers—a typical wait was anywhere from 5-50 minutes.
Beneunder, a Chinese fashion brand specialising in outdoor gear characterised by UV protection and the affordable basics brand, UNIQLO, are two fashion brands that regularly attract a noticeably higher amount of foot traffic.
Pop-up experience
Many MixC locations converted outdoor areas surrounding the entrances into temporary, themed pop-up installations. This arrangement would feature a blend of trendy brands, both foreign and Chinese, but often dominated by Chinese brands. From coffee or gelato to luxury accessories brands like Songmont, Chinese fragrance brands like Documents or toDefine, or Chinese activewear brand Oneup Active Club. The pop-ups were a creative, engaging, interactive shopping experience held just outside the mall in a style reminiscent of a typical local ‘night-market’. These pop-ups were enticing settings for photo ops, and visitors were often posing for photos around the space.
What this means for global brands
It’s not until you look closely that you realise just how immune China is to sweeping generalisations—especially when it comes to lower-tier cities where contradictions abound. Foreign brands like Nike and Adidas have the brand equity, yet their stores sat vacant. Li Ning is a Chinese brand with affordable products, and it too struggled to attract customers. Consumer confidence is at an all-time low, yet customers in the third-tier city of Liuzhou fill the store of Chinese phone-maker turned EV-maker, Xiaomi. After spending 60 days outside of China’s megacities, it is precisely because of all that I have seen that I acknowledge any sweeping judgments, or lofty takeaways run the risk of perpetuating the very thinking that's causing foreign brands to struggle in the first place. The playbooks that worked in tier-one cities don't automatically translate. The patterns visible in Shanghai don't necessarily hold in Guiyang. Treating China as a monolith or even treating 'lower-tier cities' as a single category, is part of the problem. So instead of conclusions, I'm offering questions. After visiting malls in 30 cities across China, my questions fall into two big buckets—use of physical space and competition from Chinese brands.
The digital customer journey in China has undergone profound changes over the past 10 years. How consumers search, discover, interact, and purchase using a myriad of different mobile apps has altered the customer experience. However, the offline experience—particularly in tier-2 cities and below—remains largely unchanged. In the case of 2nd and 3rd tier cities, consumers stepping into your store most likely have already interacted with your brand online, they are coming to your offline location to experience your brand and products. As a customer in Taiyuan, does the Nike store in Taiyuan’s MixC mall offer me a more interesting experience than a Nike livestream?
If the majority of transactions happen online, what are you optimising your physical stores to do—and what can customers do in your stores that they cannot do on their phone?
Does your China team have the mandate and budget to experiment with localised strategies in lower-tier cities, or are they required to scale proven tier-one playbooks?
Five years ago, walking into a Wanda Plaza in a lower-tier city meant encountering foreign brands as the aspirational anchors—Zara, H&M, Nike, and KFC. Today, ground floors in premium MixC malls are dominated by Chinese EV brands, Pop Mart, Beneunder, and Chinese sportswear. This isn't about nationalism or "buying local”. What matters is that a new generation is forming their understanding of what's premium, what's exciting, and what's worth their time based on the brands that show up in these spaces. And increasingly, those aren't foreign brands. The question isn't whether Chinese brands are inherently better at retail; I observed Li Ning and Anta stores as empty as Nike and Adidas. The question is: when the brands that are succeeding in creating compelling physical experiences happen to be Chinese, what does it mean to be absent from that landscape?
When a new generation's concept of 'premium' is being formed by brands you haven't been competing with up until now, what expectations are being set that you're not part of defining?
Olivia Plotnick is the founder of Shanghai-based marketing and consulting agency, Wai Social.
