Last weekend, I was killing time in Beijing's slick Oriental Plaza mall prior to seeing a movie downstairs. I use an Apple PowerBook at home and I thought I'd pop into the mall's big Apple store to drool over some things I can't really afford to buy. I was horrified when I got to the store and found it boarded up. A small notice on the door announced that all of Apple's retail business in Oriental Plaza would henceforth move to another space around the corner.

A sigh of relief. Just moving, I thought. But that's not the case. The new space is not actually an Apple shop, but a little boutique that is an authorized reseller for iPods (and which isn't even open yet). If I want to get my hands on a 30-inch display or packaged software, it looks like I'll have to go elsewhere.

As disappointing as the closure was for Mac geeks like me, it was not surprising. Apple doesn't do well in China, and a big shop in glitzy Oriental Plaza, 500m from Tian'anmen Square, is a lot of cash out the door every month. Why not let a pack of resellers foot the rental bill? I'll answer that question later.

But where are the customers?

The closure of Apple's store in Beijing got me thinking a little bit about brand temples in China. By "brand temple", I mean a store that is completely devoted to a mass-market consumer brand. Think Nike, Levi's and such. In the US, Apple is a master of this, as its recently opened SoHo store in New York proved.

But in China, the Apple store was kind of a halfway affair. Upscale and pleasant, and with the right address, but not the overwhelming, immersive brand experience you'd get in the US. That's not too surprising. Luxury boutiques aside, the Chinese don't generally do brand temples all that well. They always tend to be a little tatty around the edges here. A walk into the slightly depressing flagship store of Chinese sportswear maker Li Ning on Wangfujing Dajie is a pretty good example.

The brand temple problem in China is especially apparent with technology companies. The Chinese technology shopping experience tends to revolve around the enormous, zoo-like IT malls like Hailong Dasha and Bainau, or all-purpose electronics stores like Da Zhong and Gome. While the ground floors of the IT malls will have branded outlets for big local and foreign names, they tend not to be too slick. Anything off the ground floor is likely to be a cubicle staffed by one bored geek. These are shopping paradises for discount hunters searching for motherboards, not for yuppies and the nouveau riche searching for upscale laptops.

My office is above Oriental Plaza, so I spend a lot of time there. The only technology or consumer electronics company that seems to have had any success in establishing a brand temple there is Sony which, in an effective PR measure, has wrapped its store in one of its "Explora-Science" tech museums. But that appeals mostly to kids. It's recruiting its consumers of tomorrow rather than wowing its consumers of today.

The fate of the Apple store in Beijing is symptomatic of the company's problems in China. It has never been very successful here either with its computers or iPods. A walk around Hailong or any of the other computer malls shows why: Fashion is important to the Chinese mass market, but often not as important as price. In my office of more than 70 people, one girl is a Mac user. Walking around the cafes and coffee shops of Beijing I see a fair number of foreigners (journalists?) using Macs, but very few Chinese people. Why? A low-end MacBook is 11,000RMB. Your basic Founder notebook is about half that price. That's a serious difference in a city where the per capita disposable income is about 10,000RMB.

What is popular in China are inexpensive notebooks made by Lenovo, Compaq and other brands that duplicate the stylish white-on-white look of iBooks and MacBooks. People might not be willing to pay the Apple premium, but they're happy to appropriate the look, and they won't get treated as Mac poseurs for doing so the way they might be elsewhere.

It's a similar story for iPods. People certainly have them in China, but they're not ubiquitous the way they are in other markets. Pull out a non-Apple MP3 player in the US and people react to you the same way Donald Sutherland reacted to Veronica Cartwright at the end of the 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (creepy). But in Beijing where there are literally a zillion off-brand MP3 players available at any electronics shop for ridiculously low prices, the iPod is still the province of a wealthy few fashion victims (including your correspondent).

These problems are serious enough that Apple had a management reshuffle in China last August. Apple-watching site Think Secret wrote about the Cupertino giant's China woes as far back as 2002.

What's the answer to Apple's problems in the Mainland? It almost certainly isn't to try to drive the Apple brand downmarket to compete with cheaper local and even imported PC brands. A good friend of mine who knows something about China once suggested to me that Apple would be best served by abandoning the Chinese mass market completely and positioning itself as an extremely exclusive luxury brand, selling to the same crowd here that can afford Porsche Cayennes (increasingly common in Beijing) and Rolexes.

That would be a small clientele, but it would bring some focus to its marketing efforts and let it define itself as a brand. That would mean getting its products out of the sweaty IT malls and the dowdy white-goods superstores like Da Zhong (another Apple reseller), and back into places where rich and stylish people like to shop. Not only should Apple bring back the brand temple, but it should do it better than it did before, even if on a smaller scale. If you're going to pay a 100 percent premium for a computer, you want to be indulged in the store. Apple could be the company to show Chinese shoppers what a brand temple is all about, and to prove that a computer store can be as sexy as an Italian luxury brand boutique.