Skip to footer

Valentine's Day with a Chinese twist

Other than red roses and a candlelit dinner for two on Valentine's Day, nothing in Beijing says 'I love you' (vaguely, in Chinese) like an investment offering an annual return of 5.2 percent.

|
Reuters
A couple takes a photograph with a mobile phone in front of a red heart decoration on Valentine's Day in Wuhan, Hubei province, Tuesday, Feb. 14.
  • By Peter Ford Staff writer

| Beijing

You don’t need a lover to get something out of Valentine’s Day in China.

Even the lonesome can drop into the Shanghai Pudong Development Bank today and sign up for an investment product offering an annual return of 5.20 percent, which in Chinese sounds (sort of) like “I love you percent.”

But in a country that has latched on fast to the commercial opportunities presented by Western festivities such as Christmas or Valentine’s Day, the bank’s initiative is only one of the more innovative ways in which young romantics are relieved of their cash on Feb. 14.

Red roses are as popular here as they are in the US, and their price on the streets of Beijing this morning reflects that: a single bloom could cost you 20 RMB (upwards of $3.00), almost 10 times the regular price.

Candlelit dinners for two, meanwhile, are all the rage at the capital’s fancy international hotels; supermarkets have set aside shelving piled high with chocolates, cakes, flowers and wine; cinemas all over the city this week are screening a new romantic comedy, “I Do” released to coincide with Valentine’s Day, and online stores such as Taobao are promoting special offers on electric shavers, necklaces, watches and perfume.

When you type “Valentine’s Day” into Baidu, the biggest Chinese search engine, 90 percent of the results are advertisements.

Some traditionalists are worried that the Valentine’s Day celebration of innocent love has been lost in translation into Chinese. “Hotels are booked up around Valentine’s Day and florists, sex shops, and jewelry stores are booming, but few people spend Valentine’s Day with their spouse,” frets Xia Haixin on the website of the NGO he founded to protect family values.

Xia has paid to install billboards on a highway in Hebei Province, not far from Beijing, urging drivers, “Don’t have an affair on Valentine’s Day. Bring your love home.”

The craze for Valentine’s Day has largely eclipsed the Chinese calendar’s own Lovers’ Day, the seventh day of the seventh month of the year, which recalls an ancient legend.

Zhinu, the fairy daughter of a goddess, and Niulang, a village cow-herd, fell in love. Zhinu’s angry mother ordered her back into the heavens, and Niulang followed, whereupon the goddess drew her hairpin across the sky to create the Milky Way (known in Chinese as the Silver River), forever separating the two lovers.

Today they can be seen as two bright stars on either side of the Milky Way; but on the seventh day of the seventh month all the magpies in the world fly up to create a bridge across the galaxy, allowing the two lovers to spend a night together.

A charming tale, but not one that gets told very often any more. Where’s the money in it?

Get daily or weekly updates from CSMonitor.com delivered to your inbox. Sign up today.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Valentine's Day with a Chinese twist
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-Pacific/2012/0214/Valentine-s-Day-with-a-Chinese-twist
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe