This article illustrates extremely well our view that the Chinese mindset is practical, materialistic and down-to-earth. And I am talking about the entrepreneurs at Yiwu City and the shopkeepers embracing the Christmas spirit (or at least the Christmas decorations anyway); as well as the average urbanite who wants to celebrate international festivals whatever the origin and raison d’etre.
The Times: “On Thursday the Ling Guo massage parlour, in the central business district of Beijing, suddenly turned festive.
An outsized image of Father Christmas beamed from the window, flanked by a manic array of snowmen, reindeer and present-stuffed stockings. The masseuses greeted customers in Santa hats.
It is not a triumph of Western culture, but of raw Chinese salesmanship, entrepreneurial flair and desperation.
Elsewhere, the festive decorations are up, adorning everything from roadside noodle shops to suburban shopping malls. Where China’s Christmas lights used to be restricted to the big hotels and stores in Beijing and Shanghai, the briskest sales are now to small shops in provincial cities.
“We are absolutely focused more on the Chinese market and we are shifting 2,000 plastic Christmas trees a day domestically,” said Liu Qing, from Yanghang Art and Crafts, who has been part of the all-out push by manufacturers to persuade the Chinese to celebrate someone else’s season of goodwill.
“Our biggest buyers are now from Shandong and Chongqing, which is so different from a couple of years ago,” Mr Liu said. “Chinese people’s living standards have improved so much, so people start going after something more spiritual. Christmas is a lively holiday. The younger generations like it.”
For a growing number of Chinese businesses making Christmas-related goods, domestic sales now represent their single biggest — and often fastest-growing — market. It is an unexpected development in a country that does not celebrate Christmas. Without it, though, hundreds of factories would be driven to bankruptcy because, despite strong sales, Santa’s Chinese elves are working on tiny margins.
The key to the tinsel-strewn, gold-baubled Christmas-ification of China is to be found on the country’s east coast in Yiwu, the acknowledged world hub of yuletide tat — or “ornamental handicrafts” as they are described by the city’s factory owners.
It is from these workshops that Yiwu annually exports about £200 million of plastic trees, self-illuminating angel choirs and every other Christmas decoration conceivable. Other manufacturing centres in China also feed into the great £1.3 billion flow of Christmas exports, but none do it with such determination and concentration as Yiwu.
The problem, however, is that Yiwu became too good at its trade at just the wrong moment. In 2010 the city had 400 companies making Christmas products; now there are more than 750, with about 120,000 workers engaged in making Christmas goods.
The huge jump in capacity and competition coincided with a drop of about 25 per cent in what had traditionally been Yiwu’s strongest markets for its tawdry wares, Europe and the United States. The effect on profits has been harsh. This year labour costs in Yiwu have risen by 15 per cent and material prices have risen by about 10 per cent.
Chen Jinlin, from the Yiwu Christmas Products Industry Association, said that some of his members have suffered 20 per cent to 25 per cent declines in orders. “There are nearly twice as many companies as there were two years ago fighting for pieces of a smaller cake,” he said. “We are encouraging manufacturers to develop new products, especially lower-cost ones, to adjust to the new economic reality.”
But the longer-term answer, said Mr Hu, the sales manager of the Youlide Art & Crafts Company, has to be to look for new markets, China being the most convenient and potentially vast. Many of Yiwu’s Christmas goodsmakers have seen the domestic share of their sales rocket to 20 per cent of the total over one or two years.
They have also changed the way that they look at opportunities abroad: a shift of marketing focus has made Brazil the largest export destination for Yiwu’s Christmas goods, accounting for 12 per cent of the total. A similar drive has proved successful in Russia, where sales of Yiwu’s seasonal goods have tripled in the past year.
“About 80 per cent of our products go to South America, so we’ve had to change things to reflect that,” Mr Hu said. “Brazilians like their artificial Christmas trees in a paler shade of green than the Europeans.””
via Yiwu’s purveyors of Christmas tat give China a dose of ho-ho-ho | The Times.
Related articles
CHINDIA ALERT: You'll be living in their world, very soon 