THE briefcase hanging from the handlebars weighed 6lb, causing it to swing from side to side as I sailed and tacked through the Beijing streets in an armada of bicycles the other day. I was on my way from the bank to buy the office car.
The contents of the briefcase were several tightly bound bundles of banknotes. Despite its economic surge forward, China is still a society where most business is done in cash.
When the formalities at the Jeep Cherokee sales room were completed, I opened the briefcase and a clerk calmly placed each bundle of notes in a counting machine before putting it in a drawer. No one raised an eyebrow. The Chinese may not yet have developed the widespread use of cheques and credit cards, but they are good savers, and for citizens who have money almost everything has become available outside of the forbidden area of books and Bibles.
Last week, I met a Chinese car dealer at a diplomatic reception who told me he had sold 10 Ferraris in Beijing in the last year at prices ranging from $180,000 to $500,000.
As China's economy increases at 10 per cent a year, and incomes and expectations rise in proportion, the potential is enormous in all areas of the market. At present, one in a thousand people owns a car, a total of 1.2 million. If that increased to one in 100, still far below European levels, it would mean sales of another II million cars.
During the 1970s, the "three hot buys" for Chinese people were bicycles, watches and radios. In the 1980s they were colour televisions, washing machines and refrigerators a recent survey found that 40 per cent of households now own a colour television and 25 per cent a refrigerator.
Today, the "three hot buys" are cars, houses and telephones. All over China, gleaming new super stores have opened and foreign investors are moving in to take advantage of the growing prosperity. The days are long gone when Western goods were only available in the "Friendship Store".
The supermarket beside my apartment in a densely populated district where a foreigner is a rare sight sells hundreds of Western brands of consumer goods, from Panasonic VCRs to Smucker's marmalade, and lulls shoppers with Greensleeves type musak. It also carries a huge range of Chinese made products, from furniture and computers to dresses and suits, the latter displayed on rows of imported tailor's dummies with features like the cast of Baywatch.
I bought my bicycle and office equipment in this store, spending enough to qualify for two free containers of washing up liquid and a raffle ticket for a television set.
Most Chinese people still shop, however, at the countless wooden shacks and kiosks which line the main roads and the crowded lanes of Beijing. Here too consumer goods from the West, like Cheetoos, Coke and Pepsi, are commonplace.
The narrow alley beside the supermarket is always crowded with people buying melons, peppers, fried chicken, sizzling pancakes and steaming corn cobs.
In Beijing the two China's exist side by side, the new and the old, the Jeep Cherokee and the bicycle, the super clean supermarket with its neon illuminations, and the dingy alley, lit by naked electric bulbs and filled with noise and smoke.