'This will become a showcase for Shanghai,' says Mr Tan, the mall's manager.

More to the point, he admits with a nervous chuckle, the mall will be a showcase for its owners, the Charoen Pokphand (CP) Group, Thailand's biggest conglomerate and one of the largest foreign investors in China.

Most of CP group's 170 ventures in China are out of sight, spread over almost every province in the country and developed with little effort to brand them as part of the Thai group.

But perched on the banks of the Huangpu River in Pudong, Shanghai's financial centre, and across from the historic Bund district and the city centre, the $335m mall will be a very public shopfront for CP in China.

Underlining this are the Chinese characters in the mall's name, and plastered on its exterior, which symbolically match those of CP's dynastic family members.

'That's why we cannot fail. This name guarantees the fate of over 170 companies,' says Mr Tan.

CP's links with China date back to the company's founding in 1921 by two immigrants to Thailand from southern Guangdong province, who started importing seeds and fertiliser from their homeland.

The reigning company patriarch, Dhanin Chearavanont, the son of one of the founding brothers, built CP from humble beginnings into a sprawling conglomerate with interests ranging from agri-business to telecommunications and retail.

And when Beijing eased open the door to foreign investment in 1979, Mr Dhanin's CP Group was first in, aided by the chairman's up-front Chinese patriotism.

Mr Dhanin's top-level connections and willingness to take risks saw CP expand rapidly in China into areas as diverse as banking, wine-making, motorcycle manufacturing and cosmetics.

The Asian financial crisis hit the CP group hard, forcing it to sell off some of its motorcycle interests and dilute its stake in its brewery. But the company, with 80,000 employees, remains heavily committed in China. CP's revenues in China were $5bn last year, including $3bn in agribusiness, just under half of the company's total 2001 turnover of $12bn, it says. It is coy about revealing details of the profitability of its mainland ventures, and has been accused in the past of draining its listed Thai food company of cash to prop up weaker businesses in China.

The mall, which itself will add to the overall risk profile in China, has been delayed a number of times since its conception in the mid-nineties. It needed a $50m injection of cash - described by Mr Tan as not a direct loan but a 'pre-selling agreement for space' - from the Shanghai authorities to get off the ground.

The mall is located within 5km of 3m people, but distant from the bulk of Shanghai's 16.5m population.

'In two to three years, it will probably be a good business, but right now it's tough, because they don't have much population around them,' said a Shanghai-based foreign retailer.

Mr Tan adopts a more focused view of his target market, putting the mall's 'core customers' at just 500,000, including those wealthy enough to have second homes in Shanghai.

He does not doubt that the consumers' money is there. He says the average spending power of local Shanghainese is on par with Seoul and Taipei.

Maria Lapiz, an analyst at SG Securities in Bangkok, says CP's overall strategy for retail in China is to use their size - they already have mid-market retail stores there - to produce economies of scale.

'But the market is so huge and fragmented, that even if you have size in one province, it doesn't give you a lot of pricing power,' she says.

Mr Tan, who traces his heritage back to the same area in southern China as the CP family, doesn't underestimate the challenge of making the symbolically important project work.

'It is a very tough job - you need a lot of art and science and psychology,' he says. 'If I was in another place, I would have a much easier life.'

Financial Times