Singles' Day celebrates the new religion of China's middle class – consumerism
But as Deng Xiaoping said, 'To get rich is glorious'
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Your support makes all the difference.It’s the world’s biggest shopping day ever.
Today, Saturday 11 November, is Singles' Day in China. By the end of the 24 hours it runs, something like $20bn will have been spent, for it was $17.bn last year. This makes it far bigger than all the special shopping days in the West – Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Amazon’s Prime Day, our Boxing Day sales and so on – all put together.
If it has not come up on your radar, know that a number of British companies have joined in, using it as a platform to sell stuff to China. For example, Waitrose is selling UK-branded products such as biscuits and tea on the Alibaba website.
What makes it remarkable is not just the numbers, but its artificiality. This is an entirely made-up festival. The idea of there being a special day to celebrate single people was dreamt up by bachelor students at Nanjing University in 1993 as was a sort of Valentine’s Day in reverse: they did not buy a present for someone else, but bought one for themselves instead. The day, which of course has a special and sadder meaning for us, was apparently chosen because 11.11 looks like four single people.
Bachelors' Day then developed into Singles' Day, when women joined in, and then gradually was transformed into a day that might celebrate the end of bachelordom, with people buying presents for their friends and perhaps new partners instead.
The next stage in its development was thanks to the genius of Jack Ma, founder of online retail site Alibaba. In 2009 he spotted the day as a way of selling more stuff, and promoted it with his legendary brilliance.
How? Well, part of it is the standard promotional pitch, for example hiring global celebrities to launch it. Last year it was David and Victoria Beckham on duty in Shanghai – we seem to be better at creating mega-celebs than we are mega-brands. But there is something else, which is Jack Ma’s ability to connect with the young. By coincidence, I met him last year, as I had to introduce him at a conference. The extraordinary thing was that while he was listened to perfectly politely by the mostly male, business-suited audience in the stalls, the young students up in the balcony were on their feet cheering him on. Almost by definition, Singles' Day is a day for young people.
There another lesson from the creation of Singles' Day that the rest of the world can draw from China: how to get rich.
Start from the point that this is an online event. Most of the big shopping days of the West predate the internet and are tied to specific day for a reason. For example Black Friday is the bridge between Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday of November and the weekend. Many Americans take the day off and visit their families. What do you do with the spare day? You shop. Our own Boxing Day is rather the same, with the added lure of the post-Christmas sales.
But with online shopping you don’t need an extra day off to visit the shops. You stay at home and just log on. Indeed it is irrational in the internet age to have a special day for shopping at all. So I think this day tells us something rather special about the hopes, needs and aspirations of humankind.
We all need festivals, and this one celebrates what is for China the new religion of consumerism. That is should be so huge tells us that the aspirations of the burgeoning Chinese middle class are now deeply embedded in that society. This is not unlike the US in the “Keeping up with the Joneses” in America, the comic strip that ran from 1913 to 1940, when the US was in many ways at a similar stage of development to China now.
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", but that is what his reforms have achieved – the most successful development policies that have ever been followed.
Singles' Day is Deng’s achievement too.
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