Black Friday in Red China By

artappraiser — Fri, 23 Nov 2012 22:24:49 +0000

In reply to China and US manufacturing improves

Black Friday in Red China

By Evan Osnos, Daily Comment @ newyorker.com, Nov. 23, 2012

What does the Communist Party do when shoppers become dissidents?

The Chinese answer to Black Friday came on a Monday this month. Singles Day, as it's known, traces its roots to lovelorn college students in the nineteen-nineties who wanted a Valentine's Day for the unattached, an excuse to swap gifts and treat each other to dinner. This year's Singles Day, on November 11th--11/11--generated an orgy of consumption on a level the world has rarely seen. After thirteen hours, tmall.com, the big Chinese marketplace, reported that its merchants had already sold enough winter clothes, jewelry, even cars, to rack up $1.6 billion, making it the world’s heaviest day for e-commerce on record.

For the political heirs of Chairman Mao the timing was auspicious. The leaders of the Communist Party of China were huddled in the Great Hall of the People for their once-a-decade handover of power, a ritual as solemn and controlled as Singles Day is giddy and grassroots. But the Party, in its current incarnation, is big on Singles Day because it knows that if it wants to keep up the economic boom, it needs to remake the country into one that Hoovers up iPads instead of assembling them and sending them abroad, to refashion the world’s second-largest economy for a new era that privileges consumption over investment and exports.

Elsewhere on the Chinese Internet, however, a very different drama was developing [....]

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Black Friday in Red China By