November 11, known in China as Singles’ Day, started out as a wry, tongue-in-cheek holiday. It has since become a major draw for online shopping, a profoundly Chinese celebration, and an expression of the country’s modern urban youth. But the rampant commercialization of Singles’ Day may one day come to be seen as a symbol of the era of China’s bubble economy.

On November 11, China celebrated Singles’ Day, a holiday that in the span of a few short years has become the most important day of the year for Chinese e-commerce. Sales on Alibaba, the leading retailer website at the center of the holiday, are the bellwether for its success.

Alibaba first adopted the Singles’ Day name for a sales promotion in 2009 to sell winter coats, but the company quickly realized its potential. By 2013, Alibaba was racking up e-commerce sales to the tune of just under $6 billion, and three years later the company had more than tripled sales to nearly $18 billion. A year after that, in 2017, sales at Alibaba soared a further 42 percent, to more than $25 billion, and this year the company smashed that record yet again, with an additional 22 percent of total sales, for a total of nearly $31 billion. Notably, this $31 billion figure represents only Alibaba’s share—probably about one half—of China’s total e-commerce spending on the holiday.

E-commerce consumer spending on peak days in the United States pales in comparison.

Cyber Monday and the following Black Friday each November are the two biggest e-commerce days of the year for the United States, the world’s second biggest e-commerce market. Typically, U.S. e-commerce retailers rack up $11­–12 billion in sales between these two days. Online sales for Amazon’s Prime Day each July, the third biggest day for U.S. e-commerce, were estimated to total just over $4 billion in 2018. That means that these three days of peak U.S. e-commerce spending combined are still easily dwarfed by Chinese spending on Singles’ Day, during which perhaps two times the total amount of e-commerce sales changed hands in a single day.

The Chinese holiday is dominated by young people. Mostly urban Chinese between eighteen and thirty years old generally account for more than 50 percent of the day’s e-commerce sales. This age group comprises less than 30 percent of the country’s total population, which means that these young people on Singles’ Day typically purchase on average nearly two and a half times as much per person as the rest of the population in China.

Alibaba’s CEO, Daniel Zhang (or Zhang Yong), underscored how important young people are to the company’s e-commerce prospects when he said, “People born in the 1990s have become the main consumption power.” He went on to say, “They lead a very different lifestyle, they are the generation born on the internet. They’re living on the mobile internet today—the way they select products or brands is very different from [older] generations.” A November 2017 McKinsey & Company report found that the generation of young Chinese people born during the 1990s, although they make up just over 15 percent of the country’s population and earn less than the average working-age Chinese, is projected to contribute more than a fifth of China’s total consumption growth between now and 2030.

ALIBABA DID NOT INVENT SINGLES’ DAY

One of the mistaken claims that have developed around Singles’ Day is that Alibaba invented the holiday in 2009, when in fact the custom actually predates Alibaba’s seizing of its commercial potential. I remember my students jokingly explaining the holiday to me in 2002 or 2003, during my first years in China. It was clear that this “holiday” (and the term “holiday” was always accompanied by quotation marks) was pretty widely observed, or at least acknowledged. And it was evident that for young, educated Chinese, it was a tongue-in-cheek send-up of traditional Chinese values.

As far as I can tell, Singles’ Day originated at the esteemed Nanjing University in the early 1990s before spreading widely as students passed the tradition on to former high-school classmates at other elite universities. In China, high-school friendships tend to be deeply enduring and often persist well past university and into middle age, so campus fads often spread quickly throughout the country.

The meaning of the holiday is quite clear. The numbers in the November 11 date (11/11) symbolize unmarried young people living in a once-traditionalist society in which marriage typically marked the perceived start of adulthood. Amid an era of newfound freedom on university campuses in the 1980s and early 1990s, Singles’ Day became a way for single males, and later single females, to wryly suggest that there is more to adult life than marriage. In this young generation’s eyes, being single wasn’t a failure that had to be addressed as quickly as possible, but perhaps an opportunity to be enjoyed, although tradition required that students maintained the joking pretense that being single was shameful, hence the need for (pretended) consolation.  

Over time, November 11 developed tongue-in-cheek rituals among elite university students throughout eastern China, including group photos, handmade cards, dinner with single friends, and gifts. Chinese young people would typically celebrate by spending money on themselves as a way to jokingly “assuage the burden of being single.” Indeed, by the time I arrived in China in 2002, Singles’ Day had become a fairly popular ritual for modern, urban Chinese youth, albeit a ritual with no historical or traditional basis of its own, unlike Christmas presents or Spring Festival red envelopes. It was a festival for the novel, flippant China of smartphones and instant mega-cities, a China without traditions—a country in which, after growing up through the deepest generation gap in history, young Chinese urbanites were keen to splurge on themselves.