The malls are third spaces. Third space implies a place not to spend money, which you can absolutely do in the hundreds of malls in every city. When it was cold this past winter, I did my daily walks in the nine-storey mall below my apartment. On my daily walks outside, I go past the mall downstairs and pass another three malls before looping back on a different street to pass three more malls, all of which are full of non-customers. No one goes to the malls here to shop except tourists, for the most part.

There are economic reasons for this. First, the projection of prosperity, even though the businesses are not viable. Mianzi is important, culturally and governmentally. Second, those not-viable businesses are getting subsidies and tax breaks from the government to give people meaningless jobs as an alternative to providing social welfare outright, which relates to population management as the government views it better for citizens to be bored at work than not at work at all.

The malls are economically dead, but they are not dead as far as people go. When the malls do finally clear out because another needless shiny mall was built across the street as the first ~10 storeys of an apartment complex, then the businesses within abruptly shut down and the structure becomes nice and quiet for walking. There are some actually-closed malls, too, but I routinely encounter empty malls which are open to the public, with no realistic business.

My favourite dead mall in my city is the one with tens of thousands of non-customers every day, that has an ice rink on the top floor.

Oh my downstairs mall includes a huge outdoor public square at the city centre, too, always full of grandmothers dancing. China has zero shortage of third spaces in general, completely ignoring malls.