China’s culture and history stretches back, quite literally, thousands of years. However, one tradition central to the Chinese New Year is getting a digital update for the 2016 celebrations.
South China Morning Post reported that some of the country’s largest eCommerce retailers, along with the government itself, are trying to push the tradition of new year’s monetary gifts online. “Hongbao” — historically red envelopes containing cash as a gift of goodwill and prosperity to start the new year — have always been delivered by hand, but this year, Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent and the Chinese Communist Party are all trying to get people to send their new year’s gifts digitally instead.
In addition to offering digital equivalents of hongbao that the eRetailers are pushing as more flexible and convenient than physical envelopes, the Chinese government has put its money where its mouth is. A total of $50,000 has been put up as a pot from which the lucky winners can send their family and friends digital hongbao at no personal expense; however, participants have to enter a passcode — so far, all well-known sayings from President Xi Jinping — to win their share of some of those new year’s funds.
While South China Morning Post reported that some Internet commenters treated the program with derision and disbelief, TechCrunch explained that digital hongbao aren’t an absolute novelty in China. In fact, WeChat processed more than 1 billion hongbao in 2015, and on the West’s communally chosen date for the new year, another 2.3 billion were ordered through the site.
Chinese revelers clearly show an affinity for updating traditional customs to suit modern conceptions of convenience, and if the country’s eCommerce giants can continue to incentivize the move from the old to the new, more of China’s ancient traditions than just the hongbao may end up moving to mobile, the cloud and beyond.
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