The popular press has written much about China’s pent-up consumer demand. But there has been no systematic analysis of its consumers and marketing implications until very recently. Many previous studies have focused on the economic, political and market barriers to access the Chinese market (Campbell and Adlington 1988). Yet some fundamental marketing issues such as the effective market size for foreign goods and consumer preferences have not been properly addressed. The lack of rigorous research may have been caused by the often too optimistic misconception that China represents a large and homogeneous group of consumers with increasing disposable income, crazing for foreign goods. Although there may be some truth to this depiction in the eyes of a firsttime China-bound firm, nothing is farther from reality than the attempt to approach China with a monolithic view of the market.