Today was Singles Day in China. It's an unofficial holiday in which young people celebrate being single. It's become so popular that it is now biggest online shopping day in the world, putting The West's Valentine's Day to shame. I feel a great satisfaction to see my single brethren win the game of global capitalism.
Most news stories about this are just seeing it as yet another piece of evidence that China is taking over the world. But you could also see it as evidence of China's demographic problems. Their One-Child policy is well known, and combined with male-preferring cultural traditions, it's led to selective abortions and far more sinister ways of ensuring that one child is male. Thus, China has a generation in which men greatly outnumber women, and a lot of single men.
Those are some disturbing overtones to this story, so I'm trying to look at the positive: the Chinese started a rather melancholy holiday as a joke, and they ran with it. I'd love to see more of this from China. During their ascent, they've been portrayed as either an unemotional machine, or as a cryptic, alien culture. But this makes them seem human, and likable.
It's a lot like Japan in the eighties. I grew up during their economic rise, and they were portrayed the same way in media. Today they don't seem scary at all. Their economic stagnation had certainly played a part in that, but the culture they expected had a lot to do with that too, from video games to anime to sushi. It's hard to fear people once you know that they created Hello Kitty.
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