“How is This Lunar New Year’s Eve Different From Years Past? So Few Red Envelopes”

Well-liked science and present occasions blogger Xiang Dongliang’s musing on the Chinese language Lunar New 12 months 2024 is CDT’s Quote of the Day:

What struck me most about CCTV’s “12 months of the Dragon” Spring Pageant Gala?
So many adverts.
How is that this Lunar New 12 months’s Eve totally different from years previous?
So few crimson envelopes. [Chinese]

With many Chinese language shoppers tightening their belts in 2024, there are fewer hongbao (红包, bodily or digital crimson envelopes containing money items) being given this Lunar New 12 months, and the financial quantities are extra modest than in years previous. In a February 9 WeChat put up, Xiang Dongliang famous that previously, bosses would usually compete to be seen as beneficiant, conspicuously giving out crimson envelopes to particular person workers by way of WeChat, however “this 12 months there appears to be a tacit settlement to simply ship New 12 months’s greetings as a WeChat group textual content.”

Xiang additionally bemoaned the proliferation of promoting throughout this 12 months’s chunwan (春晚), China Media Group’s Lunar New 12 months Gala (or Spring Pageant Gala), broadcast on CCTV-1 and CGTN. The product placement was significantly clunky, he famous, usually interfering with the move of sketches, or seeming poorly thought out and “tacked on.” Such complaints have grow to be acquainted lately: the 2023 Spring Pageant Gala was notable for an upsurge in “booze advertisements” and fewer advertisements from China’s tech giants.

Writing for Radii, Tianrui Huang highlighted the disconnect between the values of youthful Gen Z viewers and the somewhat musty “inventory characters” who populate the annual televised gala. She factors to the rising social media pattern of Gen Zers posting movies of gala-like skits starring themselves. “By way of playful situations,” she writes, “they gently poke humor at points of the gala that they discover to be out of contact or stuffy, humorously reshaping the occasion by way of their distinctive perspective.”

The February 11 version of the ChinaTalk publication featured excerpts from a visitor put up by the Substack Chinese language Doom Scroll, with a pithy recap (and embedded YouTube movies) of among the predominant skits, music, and dance performances of this 12 months’s gala. Andrew Methven’s Gradual Chinese language publication mentions that 610 million practice tickets have been bought within the two weeks earlier than Lunar New 12 months, thus fueling using “ticket-snatching apps” designed to chop down on legwork and reduce the complications of acquiring tickets. And for What’s On Weibo, Manya Koetze profiled 9 Chinese language motion pictures at the moment competing for a slice of the home field workplace in the course of the Spring Pageant peak moviegoing season.