Chinese online shoppers spent a record $25 billion on this year’s “Singles Day” promotion run by e-commerce giant Alibaba. What happened to the traditional Chinese values of frugality?
Mao suits and ration meat
“I still remember growing up in communist China in the 1970s, when my mother and neighbours would use their ration tickets to buy meat at a state-run store,” writes Cindy Sui, a Taiwan-based BBC correspondent who has lived and worked in China for many years.
She also adds that people did not even put so much thought into shopping as there was not much to buyIn those days, kids would consider themselves lucky if they got a set of new clothes once a year. “My mind flashes back to childhood images of everyone wearing the same style of button-down shirts and elastic-waisted baggy trousers, the so-called Mao suits,”
Sui adds
Sharapova on stage
And now, the “Singles Day” is the largest e-commerce festival in the world. Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba wanted to use the ‘Bachelors’ Day’ to sell more stuff and “promoted it with his legendary brilliance,” writes the prominent business journalist Hamish McRae in The Independent. Global celebrities landed in China to launch the festival. This year, Nicole Kidman, Pharrell Williams and Maria Sharapova appeared on stage
We all need festivals, and this one celebrates what is for China the new religion of consumerism … It is also a celebration of the economic policies of Deng Xiaoping, who in 1978 took over leadership of a China impoverished by Mao Zedong’s disastrous Cultural Revolution. Deng gradually introduced market reforms that liberalised the Chinese economy but maintained the power of the Communist state. Deng was quoted as saying, “to get rich is glorious” … that is what his reforms have achieved Hamish McRae, business journalist, in The Independent