Chinese shoppers are flush with hidden income

Beijing

CHINESE consumers may have a lot more cash at their disposal than previously thought - and they're ready to flash it.

That's the upshot of two items throwing fresh light on the outlook for consumer spending, a key metric in China's much-vaunted shift from an investment- and export-led economy to one more based on people buying things such as holidays, clothing and cellphones.

Official survey-based disposable income data could have underestimated citizens' true spending power by as much as 20 per cent, according to research by the government-backed Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) in Beijing, That's because the offici…