UK toy store opens new China outlet

BRITISH toy retailer Hamleys opened its largest store in the world in Beijing on Saturday, just two days before Christmas, as debate played out over whether the holiday should be banned in the communist country.

Christmas elves, a teddy bear parade and a curiously slender Santa marked the opening of the five-storey emporium – double the size of Hamleys’s flagship London store – in the capital’s Wangfujing shopping district.

The launch comes two years after Chinese shoe company C.banner acquired Hamleys from i t s previous owner, France’s Groupe Ludendo, for £100 million ($153 million).

“In China, the holiday is just for kids. It’s a time to have fun and get some new toys,” said Daisy Yan, one of the hundreds of locals that flooded into the store.

“This place is too expensive though. The toy car my son picked out costs 10 yuan more than most other stores,” she said. A stuffed lemur had a 1,619 yuan ($245) price tag and a Hello Kitty ornament cost a whopping $335.

While the practice of religion is tightly regulated in China, Christmas has emerged as a popular occasion for its increasingly affluent middle class to exchange gifts.

But according to reports this week in state media, families of Chinese Communist Party members and officials in Hunan province have been ordered to “resist rampant Western festivals” to focus on “building a socialist culture”.

The news sparked heated debate on Chinese social media platform Weibo, where posts with the hashtag “Christmas Banned” received tens of thousands of views.