Liquor Is Quicker in China as Beer Brewers Lag Distillers: Chart

(Bloomberg) -- The Chinese are turning up their noses at beer in favor of baijiu, a hard liquor popular with the country's growing middle class. That's helped four spirits distillers become 2016's strongest performers on the CSI 300 Consumer Staples Index as its two beer brewers lag behind. Cuts in liquor taxes have boosted alcohol consumption in China in recent decades even as imbibing in other big countries declined, the Lancet medical journal reported last year.

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