IT would make you envious, the way the elderly man just closes his eyes and drifts off to sleep, oblivious to the thousands of people milling around him at the Ikea superstore in Beijing.
I spotted four snoozers during a recent visit to the shop, which more than any other building in the capital symbolises how China has changed and shows how the direction of the world will alter in a flurry of flat-pack furniture and Nordic lifestyle options.
The fact that some people go to Ikea to sleep has featured in many stories since the Swedish furniture company set up in China back in 1999, but the days when the store was full of rubberneckers come to have a look at how Westerners live their lives are largely over. Staff are there to wake those napping and anyway, the vast majority of the thousands filling the shop’s airy portals are most definitely here to shop. The nappers are more likely exhausted by sheer consumption.
This is China’s new, burgeoning middle class in action, here to furnish their pricey new apartments. Owning Ikea furniture shows you are white-collar and thriving and Beijingers can’t get enough of the stuff. You also hear out-of-town accents, as people will travel long distances from Anhui and Hebei to shop here.
There are nine Ikea stores in China now, but the company is planning to build three here every year for the next few years, hoping that more Chinese buying their furniture will compensate for slowing sales in the West.
In the canteen, hundreds of people are queuing up and there are no tables available. Tempers are reasonably even, but you do see occasional outbreaks of anger as the proximity of so many people becomes difficult to bear for some, even in China where people are used to large crowds as a matter of course.
The Swedish flag features prominently but there are plenty of nods to local culture. There are red bean Danish pastries, and Dinghu-style vegetables.
At the same time, there are the traditional offerings, including the so-called “Dad food” – meatballs and mashed potato – that is so popular in the shops everywhere.
It’s a public holiday to mark the anniversary of the foundation of the People’s Republic of China in October 1949, and the schools and government offices are closed for the week. It feels like half of Beijing has come to Ikea.
The books on the shelves are an esoteric mix indeed. There are a lot of titles by the South African writer Andre Brink, while works by the Chinese author Chen Yun are also stacked there, in French for some reason. Elias Canetti and WG Sebald are also in Beijing’s Ikea library.
It’s a bit startling in this capitalist haven to see, also in French, the collected works of Mao Zedong. You can’t help but wonder what the Great Helmsman would have made of Ikea.
Perhaps he would have enjoyed the Living Room section, especially the armchairs. There are several images of Mao that come to mind, including the classic, solid face of leadership depicted on the banknotes, and the powerful, dispassionate portrait at the front of the Forbidden City at the heart of the city.
The Hong Kong-based historian Frank Dikötter, writing in Mao's Great Famine: The Story of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, reckons that Mao was responsible for the deaths of 45 million people during the Great Leap Forward in 1958 as they were worked or starved to death in the effort to catch up with the economy of the Western world.
The official line remains that Mao’s legacy is 30 per cent bad, 70 per cent good. After all, his party is still in power and celebrating its 90th anniversary this year.
Some of the most representative depictions of Mao show him seated in armchairs with anti-macasars on the arms, or in comfortable wicker chairs, his legs crossed.
A terrific photograph from 1975 shows him sitting in a leather and wood armchair, surrounded by the ubiquitous ashtrays and teacups, opposite Deng Xiaoping, who would shortly succeed him as supreme leader and implement reforms that ultimately drove China’s economic resurgence.
Deng is sitting on the couch and leaning forward, as if eager for power, but he would have to wait until Mao’s death in 1976 to take over the reins.
And of course, the Selected Works of Deng Xiaopingsit proudly on a Billy shelf alongside Nick Hornby's Fever Pitchin Swedish.
Having Mao and Deng’s philosophical musings on the thornier issues of Marxist-Leninist thought sitting on Enteri shelves might appear incongruous, but it is this kind of juxtaposition that is at the heart of what is going on in China these days, and it’s something you get used to.
This is socialism with Chinese characteristics.
Some canny entrepreneurs have paid Ikea the ultimate compliment by setting up a fake superstore “inspired” by the company. In Kunming, in the southwest, there is a 10,000 square-metre shop called 11 Furniture, which has similar blue and yellow livery, the same rooms, and the same stubby bookie’s pencils. There is a crucial difference – they make the furniture to order, you don’t have to do it yourself.
But the canteen has no meatballs.