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New Year’s shopping frenzy reflects our faith in market-driven solutions
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IN many rural areas where market days, birthdays, and celebrations are only referred to by the lunar calendar, New Year’s Day today passes more or less unnoticed.
For urbanites like me, it means little more than a one-day holiday.
Although urbanized migrants soon adapt to the Gregorian calendar in their adopted cities, each year they still brave long queues and arduous journeys home for the Spring Festival.
If anything, observance of this festival is one of the few rituals connecting us to our agrarian roots.
Still, January 1 has become notable, particularly in recent years, as the run-up to the day has become a shopping extravaganza, with retailers offering steep discounts.
This weekend, I noticed in my neighborhood a steady stream of motorbikes loaded with packages ordered online.
I used to complain that the our security guards’ sole interest seemed to be guiding cars into parking spaces. Today some also sign for packages for absent recipients.
On Sunday when I happened to pass by the janitor’s room at my son’s primary school, I was appalled at the pile of packages, to be picked up by teachers returning to work on Monday.
Shopping mood
Real shops are not giving up without a fight. To alleviate the fears of stampedes at the year-end shopping frenzy, the Yaohan Department Store in Pudong New Area managed to put customers in the bargain-hunting mood earlier than usual.
When my wife was there Sunday, one elderly lady revealed excitedly that she had already logged 70,000 yuan (US$11,547) worth of bargains.
Even our government departments are racing against time to spend their cash before the year-end deadline (aka tuji huaqian). During the past few weeks, public toilets have been closed for sprucing up, roads have been dug up, eviscerated, and repaved.
In one park near my office a pebble-paved road had been replaced by plastic pavement, giving off a toxic smell several meters away.
When I was my son’s age of ten, I had the experience of having planted a lot of trees, and growing up with them.
Today buying trees can be a hugely profitable business.
In Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, a recent audit showed that one unit had shelled out 315,000 yuan on three trees to beautify the unit’s environment.
In a park in Xi’an, Shaanxi Province, some giant trees were uprooted to make way for a 4-meter-tall statue of a tree built of concrete and brick, costing hundreds of thousands of yuan.
Flush with money
When our public servants are flush with money, they can be quite innovative in embracing expenditures in their most sublime forms — consumption for consumption’s sake.
With human dignity increasingly dependent on the ability to consume, we cannot but marvel at the market, one of the only forces with the power to bless and to curse.
In deference to the market, yesterday the Shanghai Evening Post folded.
In defiance of market forces, Fudan University recently gave a new lease on life to one of the few remaining brick-and-mortar bookstores by subsidizing it (Xinmin Evening News, December 30).
“When a university is deprived of its bookstore, it risks losing its soul,” the shop owner declared.
Probably that’s not the only sign of soul-lessness.
If you key in “Zheda” (Zhejiang University) on Baidu search engine the first prompt is the recent arrest of Chu Jian, vice president of the University, for embezzlement of state assets.
As we usher in New Year’s Day, probably in haze, I hope our policy makers will look beyond market incentives in searching for solutions, and in identifying their priorities.
This column, named after the old saying that “one man’s meat is another man’s poison,” stresses the importance taking another perspective.
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