Chinese New Year

Billions in the economy, billions on the road

It’s that time of year again and I thought it would be a great time to tell people what’s going on in China right now

Of course, most people know it’s Chinese New Year in a couple of days and that means the schools are on holiday - every evening, we have kids playing in the open spaces outside our apartment, it’s nice to hear this as they’re usually far too busy to play outside and the only time we usually hear this is Sunday evenings, right now, it’s most afternoons and they play until 6pm when they go in for dinner then they’re out again about 7:30 for another hour or so.

As far as the rest of the world is concerned, there are several amazing features of Chinese New Year - coming from a country of 56 million which the UK was when I left , living in a country of 25 million for a period of time before coming to China, I was dumbfounded when I saw the statistics of Chinese New Year.

I saw a report on Toutiao yesterday which encompasses exactly what I mean:

The report was entitled: “Spring Festival, Every 60 seconds”

There is an App for buying train tickets and on it, it said Every 60 seconds 15,000 train tickets are sold

Every 60 seconds 9,375 people boarded a train

every 60 seconds, in China 13 planes took off carrying about 1649 passengers

Every 60seconds about 145,640 people joined the traffic leaving various cities

And finally, every 60 seconds 542 people board a boat to travel from one place to another.

I did the maths on a calculator and found that’s over 710,000 people moving every hour from now until the Chinese New Year.

I’m not sure where they got the Number but USA’s ABC are reporting there will be about 9.4 billion trips this year. They did of course caveat that with how hard it was for Chinese people and how difficult their lives in China are right now - because of course they wouldn’t want the world to know that the living conditions and lifestyles of Chinese people are far better than those of the USA. People can travel great distances on high speed rail and enjoy a great reunion at this most important time of the year for families.

Imagine being like Christmas or like Thanksgiving is to the US and then multiplying that feeling of reunion by several factors. The feeling of Gui Xin Si Jian (归心似箭 ) is one of the most important factors in Chinese life, the yearning, or longing to go home.

Just like the longing to go home and also, just like Christmas is in the West, there is a huge impact on the economy. I told you the other day in a video about the Quality Guangdong Products Go Global campaign and how that’s effecting trade for cities like Zhongshan, where I live but there’s even a Chinese New Year impact there too.

the Hua Qiang Bei electronics market has seen sales surge in the lead up to New Year. Overall sales of technology products there have increased by more than 30% compared to normal levels. Among them, AI glasses sales have surged by 70%–80%, while drones and robots have seen sales growth of 30%–50%. Bear in mind this market place in Shenzhen is the largest electronics market in the world, anyone can go there and you can buy individual or in bulk, foreign buyers have doubled over the last year.

I personally bought a pair of AR glasses, they can help me with teleprompting, with AI questions, I can play music on them and I can also use them for translation, which is handy around the dinner table in a Cantonese home - I’ll be wearing them at our Chinese New year dinner, where my wife’s entire family all speak Cantonese while I don’t.

I also bought a drone recently, confirming that these things are pretty popular and this little baby will be coming with me on my bike rides, it’s already done a few short rides so I can test out whether I can operate it from my bike and I found I can - I have to say, these kinds of technologies are really making life better for people in China - I don’t know about the AR glasses but the US did everything it cold to ban DJI’s drones - which is hugely detrimental to both their economy and the millions of people who’d like to use them, I know people will ask, this drone cost me 3,000 RMB, which is a little over $400 and that gets the additional batteries so it can fly longer. the AR glasses were a little more expensive at 3200 RMB but given that I plan to travel later in the year, they will be worth every penny when both my wife and I are in a country where neither of us speaks the language and they won’t speak much English or Chinese.

More about that later in the years though.

On that happy note, this will be the last video of the year of the Snake (in the video I said Rooster) and my next video will be coming to you from the year of the horse. So I’ll say this - have a happy new year, Xin nian kuai Le or Gong he fa choi.