What the people want, and what their own governments are prepared to, or able to, give them often varies.

I don't have an answer sorry, but you could try to start your own group, and see who gets back to you, if no other group is currently active.

Ref gear. I now buy most of it online. Even footwear, as most vendors will do exchanges. The problem with the shops is that they were often overpriced and the quality was not good, and often gear was not genuine.

I was organizing a camping trip for a school a few years ago and found everything needed online, including water tablets.

Buying from TMall and flagship stores is pretty safe these days, and probably safer than buying from local stores, sadly.
Decathlon also has a reasonable selection of gear in the larger stores, including boots. I see that there are two branches in Chengdu.

In the past in China there was a regulation, that a percentage of every domestic development had to be commercial units, and another percentage for public areas. I am not sure if those regulations still stand. This is one reason for a surplus of commercial units in places where they are not needed. There is a logic however, as it prevents large housing developments with no shops or other facilities. Several developments like this in the same district would lead to whole areas being serviceless. This is a problem with some large modern housing developments in the UK. Planning permission for large developments in the UK has a requirement for services and other public facilities now.

When we looked at renting a commercial property in Kunming a few years ago, we looked at property in Xishan district, outside of the inner ring road, and we only looked for small privately owned units; not the big developments like Nanya or Aegean.

We looked at about 30 units, in different areas from Dianchi Weichen, to smaller residential areas. We looked at prop of different age, level of decoration, and in some cases disrepair. We looked at what might be considered areas of high footfall, and dead areas. All of the properties that were for rent had one thing in common, the rent sqm/mth was the same. That would suggest some outside factor was at play. One can only guess what that might have been. It might have been government guidance, it might have been some real estate trade association fixing a suggested price. The latter suggestion would perhaps fix owner's expectations. I have noticed a culture that if things are undersold (or perceived to be) the general focus of comments is on the money you 'should be' getting. These comments will come from family and friends who are all 'experts' in money matters.
One other thing we did find in our search, that may explain runs of empty commercial units in mixed developments, a lot of it was never sold and it kind of has no owner other than the real estate developer. In one development we were told that there was an agreement with owners of domestic units not to develop the commercial units underneath their homes. In the case in question, the commercial units were on the ground floor of low rise (6-7 floors) blocks.