In the autumn of 1987, chicken began to be fried to a Kentucky recipe in a three-storey building opposite Tiananmen Square—and the event turned out to be far more complicated than the headlines suggest.
Qianmen is the southern gate of old Beijing, a commercial district where Beijingers had shopped and eaten for centuries. Tea houses stood here under the last emperors; Western-style department stores appeared here in the republic’s early years; after 1949, state-run shops and cafeterias moved in. When a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant opened on this street on November 12, 1987, it slotted into a long chain of commercial experiments—each reflecting another turn in Chinese history. The three-storey building with 500 seats became the chain’s largest restaurant in the world. Investment in the project came to $1.1 million—a modest sum by American restaurant-industry standards, but in mid-eighties China it looked like a bet on entirely uncharted territory.
A trial run took place on October 6, 1987, five weeks before the official opening. This was not merely a test of the kitchen equipment—it was necessary to find out whether the supply system could cope, whether there would be customers willing to pay for breaded fried chicken at prices that seemed dizzying. Lunch cost from 5.4 to 9.4 yuan, against an average monthly salary in Beijing of around 110 yuan. Roughly speaking, one trip to KFC could eat up a tenth of a month’s income. By comparison, a bowl of noodles at a street eatery cost a few mao—tenths of a yuan. And yet in its first weeks, the restaurant served 2,000–3,000 people a day. People stood in lines stretching down Qianmen Street—a sight painfully familiar to anyone from the Soviet Union, though in this case it was driven not by shortage, but by curiosity.
What gets me most about this story is the legal structure that made the opening possible. KFC could not simply come to Beijing and lease premises—foreign business in the China of the late eighties operated through the joint-venture mechanism written into the reform-era legislation. At the outset, the ownership structure looked like this: 60% belonged to KFC, 27% to the Beijing Cultural Bureau, and 13% to the company Beijing Food Production. A Cultural Bureau as co-owner of a fast-food restaurant—a detail that today sounds almost like a joke, yet it compresses the whole logic of China at the time: the restaurant was seen as a cultural object, a point of contact with the outside world, not simply a place where wings were fried.
Already in early 1988—just months after opening—the Bank of China joined the founding partners, taking a 25% stake. KFC’s share was reduced to 51%. The American side retained a controlling stake, but the configuration became four-sided: a foreign operator, a city bureau, a food producer, a state bank. Each partner brought something of its own—access to premises, connections within the supply system, financial channels. It was a complex piece of engineering, every bolt screwed in with one eye on the political climate. The joint venture worked like an airlock: foreign capital was allowed in, but the pressure was regulated.
The question seems trivial until you remember that McDonald’s opened its first restaurant in mainland China only in 1990—in Shenzhen, and not in Beijing until 1992. KFC beat its main competitor by several years, and the explanation for that gap runs deeper than corporate nimbleness.
In Chinese culinary tradition, chicken is a high-status food. A whole chicken on the table meant celebration, prosperity, respect for the guest. In folk medicine, chicken broth was considered restorative. Chicken was prepared dozens of ways—from kung pao to running chicken, from smoked to drunken. When a Chinese customer saw breaded fried chicken, they saw a familiar protein in an unfamiliar shell—exotic without being unsettling. A beef patty in a bun had no such cultural foundation. In northern China, beef was more the food of Muslim neighborhoods; in the south, it was associated with draft animals—eating a working animal seemed wasteful. Bread in the form of a round bun did not fit at all into a system where a meal was built around rice or noodles.
KFC, essentially, got a head start not because of marketing genius, but because of a coincidence: its core product proved compatible with the local grammar of food. That coincidence, however, needed refinement. In its very first years, the chain discovered that Chinese customers expected hot soup, rice, vegetable sides from a restaurant—everything that made up a proper lunch by local standards. The menu began to mutate slowly.
Frying chicken to KFC standards is a task that requires predictable raw materials. A chicken carcass must be of a certain size, a certain fat content, a certain age at slaughter. In late-eighties America, there was an industry behind this, honed over decades: vertically integrated poultry farms, cold chains, standardized feed. In China in 1987, nothing of the kind existed.
Chickens in the PRC were raised mostly on small farms and household plots, with varied feed and no common standards. Refrigerated logistics were fragmented. One of the first tasks facing the joint venture was creating a supply chain almost from scratch: finding farmers, agreeing on raising standards, arranging transportation in conditions where refrigerated trucks were vanishingly rare. In essence, KFC had to invest in Chinese agriculture before it invested in marketing. The company gradually built a supplier network that would eventually become one of the largest in the country’s food industry—hundreds of farms, processing plants, logistics centers.
This infrastructure work is invisible to the customer simply picking up a tray of wings, but it was precisely what allowed KFC by the mid-nineties to open dozens of outlets a year. Without a reliable supply chain, every new restaurant would have become a lottery. The mechanism worked because it was assembled not from American blueprints, but from Chinese parts, each one fitted by hand.
For a long time, the first restaurant by Qianmen remained something like an exhibition pavilion. People came to look at the plastic trays, the paper cups, the cash register, the smiling staff in uniform caps. Families took photographs by the entrance. For late-eighties Beijingers, it was a tangible fragment of abroad, accessible without a visa or foreign currency. Lunch was expensive, but manageable as a one-off expense—and people spent on it as they would on a ticket to the movies or an amusement park. It was consumption as experience, consumption as event.
The turning point came gradually. Rising urban incomes in the nineties—and the rise was swift, with average salaries in major cities doubling every few years—turned KFC from a luxury into an affordable pleasure. When lunch stopped costing a tenth of a salary and began costing a fiftieth or a hundredth, the type of visitor changed too. Students arrived, studying in the restaurant for hours and using it as an air-conditioned reading room. Mothers came with children, for whom KFC became a Sunday ritual. Office workers came, needing a quick lunch. The showcase became an everyday kitchen.
Menu localization proceeded in parallel. Congee for breakfast, egg tarts, spicy Sichuan-style chicken wings, rice dishes, soy milk—by the 2000s, KFC’s Chinese menu differed so radically from the American one that a visitor from Louisville, Kentucky, would have struggled to recognize the chain they knew. There is an irony in that, I think: a company named after a particular American state succeeded in China precisely by ceasing to be Kentuckian.
The policy of reform and opening up, which Deng Xiaoping began pursuing in 1978, is often described through macroeconomic indicators—GDP growth rates, volumes of foreign investment, the number of special economic zones. But the policy also had an everyday, bodily dimension: what people ate, where they ate it, how they felt about food that had come from outside. The KFC by Tiananmen is one of its most vivid artifacts.
The restaurant opened at a moment when the reforms had already gathered momentum, but their future remained uncertain. Less than two years remained until the events of June 1989. After them, many Western companies froze their projects in China—but KFC stayed and kept operating. The restaurant in Qianmen survived the political crisis, the inflationary surge of the late eighties, every shift in course. It stood in the same place while the square across the road changed its meaning in the eyes of the world.
KFC’s success in China is, to a great extent, a story of Chinese urbanization: hundreds of millions of people moved from villages to cities, lost access to home cooking, began eating outside the home. They needed predictable, quick, hygienic places to eat—and the state food-service system inherited from the planned economy was collapsing faster than private enterprise could be built. KFC and chains like it filled the vacuum. Local management—Chinese executives who understood the market from within—played no smaller a role in this than American standards and capital.
By 2024, China had more than 10,000 KFC restaurants—more than any other country in the world, including the United States. They are run by Yum China, spun off into a separate company and traded on the New York and Hong Kong stock exchanges. And that first Qianmen restaurant is still open—it has survived several renovations, and today tourists sometimes go in specifically to photograph the plaque bearing its founding date, though the area is full of newer, more convenient KFC outlets.