Searching for China's fast food chains - Paul French

Paul French

Foreign fast food chains like McDonalds and KFC are wildly popular in China, but domestic chains failed to have a similar success. Retail analyst Paul French explores in Foreign Policy why his favorite Real Kung Fu restaurant has only a few hundred outlets, while foreign competition has many thousands.

Paul French:

My Shanghai Real Kung Fu is still around -- even flourishing. The once-dirty floors are now mopped every hour; the dog-eared paper menus have given way to illuminated menu boards that hover over high-tech registers manned by smiling, uniformed employees who move almost robotically from counter to kitchen and back. Real Kung Fu promises your entire meal within 60 seconds of ordering or your money back, and I have yet to claim a refund for my favorite dish, the really rather good chicken-and-mushroom rice. They've learned a few tricks. 

The same can be said of other vastly improved and emerging local fast-food places, such as Mandefu and Baijila, small-scale Chinese chains doing slightly Westernized variants of local favorites, complete with knockoff Western logos -- Mandefu's red and yellow sign front owes more than a bit to McDonald's palette, while Baijila taunts KFC with a slightly feminine Colonel Sanders. 

But China's up-and-comers, its aspiring middle class, prefer the status of the real thing. McDonald's and KFC are still largely the preserve of the bai ling and young families on the make, who go for a little taste of things foreign, and a sign perhaps that they really are moving up. As Warren Liu, a former KFC senior executive, has written, when the chain's first restaurant opened just outside Tiananmen Square back in 1987, "Customers were attracted to KFC's Chinese brand name; its American roots; its likeable, grayish, beard-bearing brand spokesperson -- Colonel Sanders; the unique restaurant décor; the new way of ordering food; the bright red and blue colors of the brand logo; the American music broadcast inside the restaurant; and, as an added bonus, a very clean toilet!" That's mostly all still true... 

The truth is: The Chinese people are both aspirational and eminently sensible when it comes to partaking of the benefits of global capitalism. Great cars come from Germany, luxury fashion from France and Italy, and fast food from America. And the hundreds of millions who make up China's new middle class want the best of everything: Audi cruisers, Gucci purses -- and, it would seem, KFC's Dragon Twister.

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Paul French is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

China Weekly Hangout

Not all foreign firm are doing well in China. The +China Weekly Hangout discussed on January 30 why foreign companies fail in China, with as panelist +Richard Brubaker of Collective Responsibility and +Andrew Hupert, expert on conflict management in China. Moderation: +Fons Tuinstra of the China Speakers Bureau. Including references to Apple, Mediamarkt, Foxconn and many others.

The upcoming cyber war is the subject of the +China Weekly Hangout on Thursday 27 June. The revelations by Edward Snowden showed that the US is preparing a military shake-out, as both China, Russia and other countries are building up their cyber war capacities too. Joining us are former security consultant +Mathew Hoover and media en communication lecturer +Paul Fox of the Hong Kong University. Moderation by +Fons Tuinstra, president of the China Speakers Bureau.