Singles Day is more than billions in sales on Alibaba and JD.com. Singles Day is more than a day for lonely hearts in China. It is both.
While now November 11 in China is more commercial than Christmas, it had a similar journey from cute to crass.
In 1993 students at Nanjing University chose November 11 as Bachelor’s day, for unmarried men to celebrate their singleness and buy themselves a present. They chose the date 11.11 as the numbers look like four singles.
The numbers are also reminiscent of empty branches, which gave us the slang term: bare branches day.
This was a decade or so after the start of China’s one-child policy, which officially began in 1983 but was hanging over Chinese society unofficially since 1979.
Bachelors Day took off and was renamed Singles Day to encourage unmarried women to join in.
As TV presenter and relationship academic Yue Xu said, the day evolved to become a deadline for those who weren’t married to update their status.
“Rather than seeing it as a way of celebrating single-hood, they see it as an end date,” Xu said. “This is the last day I’m going to be single.”
Lonely hearts would treat each other to dinner or buy another a present, perhaps ending their single status, making the day more like a Chinese Valentine’s Day.
But there’s a nuance in China that needs to be explained. The notion of being single was a foreign concept until recently. Chinese people were either married or not married, Xu said.
“China used to be a society where there was no dating culture,” she said. “There was no going on dates to turn into a relationship. You see someone if you can marry them or you never see them again. It’s all or nothing.”
As the one-child policy took its toll on Chinese youth, singles were becoming all the more common as male children were preferred.
In January 2015, China’s National Health and Family Planning Commission acknowledged in a statement on its website: “Our country has the most serious gender imbalance that is most prolonged and affecting the most number of people”.
In 2013 about 119 boys were born for every 100 girls, leading to estimates that by 2020, men at marriage age would outnumber women by 24 million.
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