Red carpet for foreign retailers

Zhou says retail is also an integral part of real estate, which is one of the real drivers of the Sichuan economy.

European retailers deciding to become an anchor tenant in a mall can make or break a development.

"Retail is very related to real estate and it is the real estate sector which to some extent drives Chinese economic development," says Zhou.

"So when a foreign retailer comes in and becomes an anchor tenant in a particular development, other people also then tend to come in and it creates a lot of investment. It is a catalyst for growth certainly."

Government officials, according to Zhou, also have added incentives to bring in foreign retailers because their performance is measured by how much inward investment they deliver.

If they land a major European or foreign retailer, they will be seen to be performing well.

"Some of the officials' yearly-, three- or five-year performance is based on how much foreign investment they can bring into the region," she says.

Zhou herself was partly attracted back to her home city of Chengdu by the strong economic development in the region.

She left initially to study marketing at The Universite Robert Schuman in Strasbourg in France.

She worked initially for a French medical device company helping it enter the China market before setting up a consultancy helping small- and medium-sized enterprises build business links in China.

She carried out this work in France before relocating to Shanghai, where she joined the European Chamber two years ago.

"Economically, Southwest China was taking off very rapidly and aggressively and it was a perfect match for me with the chamber."

She believes some of the Sichuan retail habits are very similar to those of the French.

"I think Europeans and, particularly, the French, have the same understanding about what life is all about and they want to spend money and be comfortable."

Zhou says major foreign retailers are looking to establish a presence in the third-tier cities in Sichuan.

US retailer Walmart has already established in Yibin and French supermarket chain Auchan has been looking to open there also.

"I think the main problem with third-tier cities is that they are not well connected and have poor distributions links. There are, particularly, geographic problems in Sichuan since the province is surrounded by mountains which adds to the difficulty of traveling between cities," she says.

"The economies of certain third-tier cities are poor also and people may not have the money to buy whatever they want."

She says there is an interesting retail dynamic in Chengdu, where people who work in the city go off to the mountains at the weekends and people from the nearby third-tier cities come into shop.

"They rush into the city and fill all the shopping malls. They come to Chengdu and can buy whatever they want," she says.