The core monthly gauge of Chinese consumer demand: goods sold directly to households and institutions plus catering revenue. The signal lives below the headline — catering vs goods, urban vs rural, and within the 16 above-quota categories where autos and the property chain (appliances, furniture, building materials) drive the swings. Mind the conventions: January and February are published combined, and YoY rates are the NBS's comparable-basis figures that cannot be reproduced from the absolute values.
Total retail sales of consumer goods (社会消费品零售总额) measures goods sold directly to households and institutions plus catering revenue — the core monthly gauge of Chinese domestic demand. Note it excludes most services consumption (education, healthcare, housing). The headline series starts in 1984, monthly YoY in 2000, the urban/rural and catering/goods splits in 2010, and above-quota categories in 2010-11.
How to use it: Level shows the monthly flow (with a prior-year comparison bar when a single series is selected); YoY shows the official monthly growth rate; YTD shows year-to-date cumulative values overlaid by year; YTD YoY shows the official cumulative growth rate. Online retail series exist only on a cumulative basis — view them under YTD / YTD YoY.
Conventions that matter: (1) January and February are published combined each year — January has no standalone data and February carries only the cumulative (Jan+Feb) value, so the gap at the start of each year in monthly views is in the source data itself. (2) All YoY rates are the NBS's comparable-basis published figures — the above-quota enterprise panel changes every year and history was revised after the 5th Economic Census, so growth rates derived from the absolute values will not match the published rates. This site never computes its own growth rates for this dataset. (3) Online retail switched to a new basis in 2026 ("online retail of goods and services"), not comparable with the old series; the chart shows them as separate segments.
Why it matters: Retail sales is the core read on domestic demand, consumption policy (e.g. trade-in subsidies) and deflation pressure. The composition usually carries more signal than the headline: catering vs goods tracks the recovery in social consumption, autos/appliances/furniture/building materials tie to subsidies and the property chain, and gold & jewelry mixes safe-haven with wealth effects.