What Party Congress? On \'Singles Day,\' China Said to Surpass U.S. Cyber Sales

BEIJING - In China on Sunday, as the leaders huddled, the people shopped. A lot.

Nov. 11 may have been the fourth day of the week-long 18th Party Congress which is choosing, in secret, a party Central Committee and the future leaders of the country's 1.35 billion people. But it was also Singles Day - an unofficial festival that Chinese say is unique in the world, marked by furious shopping, often online, for anything from winter clothes to jewelry to cars, for those either celebrating or bemoaning their single status.

For the government, which is spooked by falling economic growth rates as it negotiates a delicate political transition, the consumption boom - even if just for one day - is a boon.

The origins of what is known in Chinese as “Guanggun jie,” or, literally, “Bare Branch Festival” (guanggun also means bachelor), are somewhat mysterious, but reportedly date back to a charmingly low-key, local story: the uneventful lives of four single, ma le, Chinese university students in the 1990s, as a blogger on the social networking site Renren.com explains in a bilingual entry called “Lu Zhenxing's Diary.” (Does anyone else feel a movie script stirring?)

“An old story goes that once there were four single men, leading very boring lives. None of them were married, or had lovers, or did anything exciting. They just sat around all day and played Mahjong,” Lu Zhenxing's Diary narrates.

“One day they played Mahjong from 11 in the morning until 11 at night,” it runs. The four numerals, added together, perfectly represented their plight: four single men. And the date was 11.11. It was all too good to be true, and “These college students have since graduated, and carried their university tradition into society,” Lu Zhenxing's Diary notes, with celebrations among the unmarried beginning in Nanjing, a former capital where one of the country's most famous universities, Nanjing University, is located, in the 1990s. “Singles Day is now a special day for all fashionable youths,” the diary notes.

The story can't be proven, but either way, it's a welcome boost for the government, which is pushing for an upsurge in domestic consumption as China's economy has plunged, as my colleague Keith Bradsher writes.

The Associated Press reported that in the first 13 hours of business on Sunday, merchants on Tmall.com, which is owned by online giant Alibaba, took in a whopping 10 billion renmimbi, or $1.6 billion.

That would top the $1.25 billion that research firm comScore said online retailers in the United States took last year on Cyber Monday, the Monday after Thanksgiving, and might make Singles Day the biggest e-commerce sales day on record, the A.P. wrote.

“This is very, very big for us,” Steve Wang, vice president of Tmall.com and head of website operations, said, and Sunday might be the “biggest e-shopping orgy ever,” the company said on its Webs ite. China has 193 million online shoppers, more than the 170 million in the United States - and the number is only growing, the A.P. wrote.

Yet while some single Chinese people were celebrating their status, others felt highly ambiguous about it.

“The main way to celebrate Singles Day is to have dinner with your single friends, but it's important that each person pay their own way to show their independence,” the diary noted.

But, “People also hold ‘blind date' parties in an attempt to bid goodbye to their single lives,” it continued. “Some people will use this date and this meaning to tell their special someone that they are the only ‘one' in their heart.” And, with that, presumably exit the ranks of those shopping up a storm on that day.