Chinese pundits and comics call Xiao Qi and Yang’s generation of young Chinese the 脑残, nǎo cán, “the brain-dead” generation. Members of the post-90s generation are mostly digital natives, very much in sync with the face-in-phone stereotype of millennials around the world. As of 2016, 85 percent of Chinese between ages eighteen and thirty-five have smartphones, compared with only 43 percent of those over thirty-five years old.1 (In the cities, age notwithstanding, an impressive 88 percent of city dwellers use smartphones.)2
On this night Xiao Qi and Yang’s friends at the table were doing justice to the stereotype. I scanned the restaurant. Sure enough, the entire courtyard was filled with silent tables as patrons thumbed away on their smartphones.
From within the maze of wooden tables, a short, stout elderly woman in a grease-stained apron appeared, hoisting a heavy metal pot and quick-stepping her way toward us, her shoulders bunched tight under the load of the stew. Her practiced hands placed the pot on a metal rack over the gas burner before she reached underneath to flick it on. Flames began to lick the bottom of the pot. The old woman told us to enjoy our meal in heavily accented Sichuanese dialect, then sped off to the kitchen, weaving through the crowd to get there.
The smell of slow-cooked lamb broth and coriander soon reached my nose as waves of steam from the pot glimmered under the lights suspended over the courtyard. Just beyond the courtyard walls, cars sped by and three-wheeled motorbikes with tin cabs ferried commuters from the subway station to their apartment complexes. Lamb stew is said to warm the whole body and stock it with nutrients to keep you hearty through the cold months. Tonight’s lamb stew invitation had signaled winter’s arrival in this gateway to western China.
Xiao Qi and Yang kept stealing kisses. From the corner of his eye, their friend Renée, a young filmmaker and aspiring director, kept peeking at them. He coughed. They continued to canoodle. He coughed louder. They ignored him. Finally, Renée blurted out, “I can’t be near them anymore! Their cuteness is making me physically ill.” He looked toward Rebecca for support. She did not so much as look up from her phone to acknowledge Renée had spoken.
Rebecca was twenty-three and a recent returnee to Sichuan Province. She often went by her English name, which someone had given her while she was working in Shanghai. Everyone knew Renée had a crush on Rebecca. In response to her silence, he tousled his long hair and went back to his phone. I could see it was opened to Tantan, the Chinese dating app. Renée chose his English name for the same reasons he kept his hair long and a trim goatee, more in a Japanese style than what is popular in Mainland China. “It makes me seem more mysterious,” he had told me.
Brain-dead or not, the entire clientele of the restaurant was engaged in excessive phone activity. I disrupted the cuddling couple to ask Xiao Qi, “Is today some sort of brain-dead national holiday? What’s the deal with all of the phones?”
Xiao Qi raised his eyebrows. “Don’t you know what tomorrow is?”
I shook my head. I did not. Without looking up, Yang pointed to the TV mounted on the concrete wall in the courtyard. The news anchor on CCTV’s nightly news was doing her evening report: “With Singles’ Day right around the corner, Chinese singletons are fervently scanning the web, determined to find love and happiness…”
“Tomorrow is Singles’ Day,” Xiao Qi said with a grin and pulled Yang a little closer.
I looked at Renée’s phone screen. He had found a match on Tantan, and now he was considering how to start the conversation with her, typing a sentence and then deleting it until he settled on “Happy Singles’ Day ^_^.”
“Like Valentine’s Day?” I asked.
“Similar but inverted,” Renée said. “Valentine’s Day celebrates that you have a girlfriend. Singles’ Day reminds you that you don’t.”
Motioning at the room full of people glued to their devices, I asked, “So everyone here is scouring Tantan for a date?”
Xiao Qi shook his head and motioned to the TV once more.
“Shoppers everywhere are getting their purchases ready for Singles’ Day to take advantage of the steep discounts. This year Alibaba will have tens of thousands of vendors making discounts. Jack Ma [Alibaba’s founder] expects to break the global single-day spending record yet again, and this time in record speed.”
The special reports on Singles’ Day would air all night long.
“Singles’ Day is our major consumer holiday,” Xiao Qi said. “Everything on Taobao [Alibaba’s online marketplace] is put on sale for twenty-four hours. They’re all on their phones using the Taobao app and planning what they’re going to buy.”
“On Chinese Reverse Valentine’s Day, everyone just buys things?” I asked.
Xiao Qi nodded before motioning toward Renée, who was laboring over what to write to his match on Tantan. “Others are searching for … distractions.”
Renée cursed under his breath, turned his plastic stool away, and cast another furtive glance in Rebecca’s direction. She rolled her eyes and pivoted her chair to face the other direction.
* * *
Singles’ Day, Guānggùn jié, translates literally as “Bare Branch Day.” The four lonesome ones in the date—November 11, or 11/11—refers to China’s singles, still-bare branches without their own family tree. Singles’ Day’s humble beginnings date to the early 1990s and a group of college guys from Nanjing. These young men had one thing in common: despite their best efforts, they were still single. Each year on 11/11 the singletons would get together. The holiday grew modestly in popularity over time through word of mouth and, eventually, online forum chatter, and then nurtured annually by beer, karaoke, and commiseration. No one aspired to be invited to attend again the next year.
Two decades later, in 2009, Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba, reinvented Singles’ Day after it caught his eye. Without Christmas to drive sales in China, Ma was searching for a way to boost Taobao’s revenue between Chinese National Day in September and Chinese Spring Festival (better known as Chinese New Year), which, because of the fluctuations of the lunar calendar, typically occurs somewhere between early February and late April.
China has roughly two hundred million single citizens older than eighteen.3 They are playfully called single dogs. If they formed their own country, they would be the sixth-largest nation in the world, ranked between Brazil and Pakistan. It would undoubtedly be an island nation. China also has the largest online matchmaking business in the world, Baihe, which has 220 million registered accounts. Should these single dogs form an island nation, it would be one of the few countries in the world that nearly all citizens would be doing their damnedest to leave.
Alibaba transformed Singles’ Day into a one-day shopping bonanza. It started with twenty-seven vendors who agreed to slash prices for a twenty-four-hour period. It grew almost uncontrollably.4 Within only three years of its introduction, Singles’ Day had broken the global single-day spending record for any holiday, eclipsing Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined.5 (Singles’ Day sales were nearly three times America’s two biggest shopping days combined in 2015.)6 Just five years after Ma turned it into a spending holiday, Singles’ Day had grown to twenty-seven thousand vendors. Years after that, the number had swelled to over forty thousand and included global vendors.7 In 2016 online sales on Singles Day alone were more than Brazil’s total projected e-commerce sales for the year.8 Alibaba did its first billion dollars’ worth of sales in five minutes.9
Singles’ Day and Taobao presaged a new era for Chinese consumption. In 2014, during the twenty-third hour of his record-breaking Singles’ Day, Jack Ma stood in front of a crowd of employees and reporters and proudly proclaimed, “Witness China’s online shopping and consumer demand … Today, we can see strength and vitality within that demand. We’ve just used a novel way to bring that demand to the surface.”10
What many marketers, competitors, and amateur anthropologists want to know is, well, how? Chinese families are famously big savers. Urbanization has forced families to spend mor
e money on city living, but the Chinese household savings rate remains about 30 percent of disposable income. (The United States just celebrated an increase to 5.5 percent.) By the numbers the Chinese Born After ’90 generation is different from previous generations. In 2000, when Xiao Qi was only eight years old, only 4 percent of Chinese families were considered middle class (households earning 60,000 to 229,000 RMB—US$9,000 to US$34,000—a year. By 2012, when Xiao Qi was a sophomore in college, the number had exploded to 68 percent.11 Still, when Western marketers write about Chinese millennials, they describe them as if they are a pack of unicorns, magical and elusive.
When Jack Ma and Alibaba were able to coordinate more than forty thousand vendors to slash prices on name-brand, high-quality items from all over the world in every single category of product, Double 11 sparked nothing less than fervor—fervor to the tune of $5 billion in an hour, as of 2016.12 This one holiday offered many complete worlds of products—shoes, clothing, technology, furniture, and even cars—at half the regular price.
On a normal day Alibaba ships seventeen million packages worldwide; the week after Singles’ Day, it shipped nearly 650 million. The company estimated that it had deployed 1.7 million delivery personnel, 400,000 delivery vehicles, 5,000 warehouses, and 200 airplanes to get everything where it needed to go.13
The days leading up to Singles’ Day in China are focused mayhem. To participate in Singles’ Day without preparation, Xiao Qi explained, is like “trying to conquer a city without a map of its walls and gates.” I laughed. Xiao Qi cocked his head and raised his eyebrows. He wasn’t joking.
* * *
Singles’ Day aside, China actually has two Valentine’s Days, the traditional one, called Qi Yi, and the adopted Western holiday. Compared with Singles’ Day, neither has gained any real traction in modern China. Pundits have described Singles’ Day as a form of mass retail therapy, a drowning of sorrows in discount sales. While that may be the case to a certain extent, Singles’ Day also thrives because it offers a genuine solution to the problem it poses: singledom. Jack Ma’s Singles’ Day has been so successful financially because it plays a clever psychological trick. Whereas Valentine’s Day is an opportunity to celebrate what you have, Singles’ Day provides an opportunity to get what you want.
It is said in China that when a woman is searching for a man, a real catch is 高富帅, gāo, fù, shuài—“tall, rich, and handsome.” The punch line is “but, actually, tall and handsome you can do without!” That leaves rich. Yang explains, “What am I supposed to do with a tall guy? Will his height put food on the table? And handsome? Too handsome and too many other women will be interested. I’ll have no sense of security with him out and about.”
The saying for men is that they should find someone who is 白富美, bǎi fù měi—“pale, rich, and beautiful.” And of course the punch line is “but, actually, pale and rich you can do without!” That leaves beautiful, so young women like Yang feel tremendous pressure to participate in one of the fastest-growing markets in China: beauty products.
Both sets of requirements—tall, rich, and handsome as well as pale, rich, and beautiful—originated as satire in online forums, biting commentary on China’s shallow standards of attractiveness. Now news anchors for the major state-sponsored television network reference these descriptions as social fact.
Renée neatly summarized the correlation between Singles’ Day and mass retail: “We Chinese like to have nice stuff. Girls like guys with nice things. Nice things translate to a good income. Good income means you can provide a stable life. Everyone wants a stable life. So I bought this stupid iPhone.”
Chinese analysis of Singles’ Day orbits around this type of consumer semiotics; it focuses not on what a product can do but what it represents. What does a new car represent? What does an iPhone symbolize?
At the most basic level, the ability to buy and then have a certain phone, wear a certain brand, or drive a certain car symbolizes security. Chinese matchmaking remains heavily gendered. For Chinese women seeking a match, few factors are more important than what China’s bevy of TV dating shows and romance series refer to as 安全感, ānquán gǎn, a sense of security or feeling of safety. The sense of security that women seek from men is often financial. Parents in particular emphasize the importance of finding someone who can provide a “sense of security” for their daughter. Several decades ago the word ānquán gǎn did not mean what it does today; it is a modern euphemism, the byproduct of a culture in which financial security was not a guarantee and some people became wealthy while others struggled to make ends meet. Every dating site and marriage market in China posts three basic statistics: age, height, and income. The first two are fixed, though the spikes in plastic surgeries certainly attempt to ameliorate these genetic constraints. The third—income, or at least the perception of income—is more malleable. With Singles’ Day’s many deals, a young man like Renée can boost his perceived value at half the price.
Renée was looking at a denim jacket with a white fur collar from Levi’s. I asked him if he knew whether it was real. “Ha! Of course it’s fake. The real one costs twice as much,” he replied. “But our fakes in China can be very good. We made the real ones to begin with, am I right?”
Taobao became overwhelmingly popular because China’s young people are aspirational, but they’re not yet wealthy. Taobao offers them the brands, looks, and types of products they want at a steep discount. More than 60 percent of the goods on Taobao failed to meet China’s retail-goods standards, according to the Chinese State Administration of Industry and Commerce based on a random sampling. (Taobao retorted that the survey only selected 51 products out of the more than 1 billion they had on sale.)14 Even if Chinese young people do not have much money, Taobao allows them to buy fashionable clothes and high-performance electronics without breaking the bank. The goods aren’t always real, but they are within reach and often of similar quality.
Renée pointed to his Abercrombie jeans and said, “The best fakes are often made in the real factory, maybe by an enterprising night manager. Often an expensive material is swapped out for a cheaper lookalike. The important part is the brand names. Those all look real.”
Anything and everything is available on Taobao—from name-brand clothes, both real and knockoffs, to electronics, bespoke suits, locally harvested honey, or Tibetan jewelry. In the six years following the creation of Singles’ Day, the number of packages Taobao delivered annually increased from one billion to ten billion. Seventy percent of the Born After ’90 generation who buy online prefer to use Taobao.15
Taobao is also democratic. Competition is fierce and users obsessively rate their purchases. The best products naturally rise to the top. Taobao fundamentally changed purchasing power in China by making it possible for people to buy that Gucci belt knockoff while they were still making the equivalent of US$500 a month at a low-level tech job.
For the real stuff, everyone knows to buy from Alibaba’s T-Mall, where 85 percent of the products are genuine, or from Jingdong, Alibaba’s massive e-commerce competitor. However, Jack Ma’s e-commerce buying platform reigns supreme. The combined sales of T-Mall and Taobao mean that Alibaba has 75 percent of China’s e-commerce market. Amazon, in comparison, accounts for less than half of the e-commerce market in the United States.16
“Fake or not isn’t a big deal,” Renée continued. “We want an OK quality and brand names. Taobao allows us to get that most of the time at a discount. And on Singles’ Day everyone slashes their prices. The sales are better than any other time in the year.” As he spoke, Renée used his Taobao phone app to add the denim jacket to his e-cart for checkout. The cart was crammed with items he would buy after midnight when the sales began.
* * *
On the eve of Singles’ Day it felt as if everyone in the entire country was standing by their phones or computers, waiting to push all their bookmarked items into their checkout bin. Friends teamed up on group chats to scour for and swap information about the best
upcoming deals. Entire blogs devoted to shopping strategies for Singles’ Day circulate spreadsheets that compare the best deals on laptops and the prices of different phones offered by competing platforms. Masses of Chinese buyers had reserved an entire year of big-purchase shopping for this one day in November.
Singles’ Day attracts everyone, not just singles. Xiao Qi and Yang would be buying too. Xiao Qi wanted to replace his old, beat-up jacket. Yang would buy a new pair of winter boots.
Yang also planned to buy something else on Singles’ Day. She clicked on an ad a friend had sent her: “Double Eyelids for Double 11!”
Yang had become convinced that she would not be beautiful enough to keep Xiao Qi without “double eyelids,” a new beauty trend in China, like a six-pack or a light skin. The double eyelid fold is a horizontal crease in the skin of an eyelid that appears when someone who has it opens and closes their eyes. While it is something I had never considered, it has become an obsession in China. (Someone who has had the surgery looks as if she’s had a minor eye lift.)
I learned more about the craze at the Guangzhou Beauty Conference, the twenty-fifth biggest beauty expo in the world. The Disney World-esque crowds flock from all over Asia and around the world, packing into five multilevel hangars. Hotels fill up months in advance. I met a woman named Lily who ran a company that sold double eyelid stickers. She promptly sat me down in a chair on a small stage so she could use me as a sales gimmick.
“Close your eyes,” Lily instructed after I was seated. Fifteen young women hovered around us, watching intently.
Lily stood over me like a doctor performing an examination for a theater of med students. Gesturing with a closed pen, she pointed to my eyes. “Watch what happens, ladies. OK, open them slowly.”
Young China Page 13
