How Christina Zhu turned Sam’s Club into Walmart’s unlikely growth engine in China

Christina Zhu, the head of Walmart’s China business, remembers when Chinese shoppers did not have much choice. As a child, she watched her parents wake up at 4:30 a.m. on Sundays to go to the wet market. “They had to haggle, and high-quality produce wasn’t always guaranteed,” Zhu, born in 1973, recalled at the Fortune Leaders Forum in Macau in September. Today, Chinese shoppers are “probably the group with the most choices [in the world],” and they have become “the most demanding customers,” she said. Meeting those rising expectations has become the defining challenge for retailers in China, and Walmart has managed…