During the travel season, China recorded more than 2.8 billion cross-regional passenger trips, an 8.2% increase year-on-year. That’s trains packed to the doors, highways jammed with cars, and airports moving people at an industrial scale. The world’s largest human migration remains exactly that. 

Where people holiday, money follows. Domestic tourism clocked 596 million trips over the holiday, generating RMB 803.48 billion ($116 billion) in revenue. Hotels filled, scenic spots turned away guests and every noodle stall within a five-kilometre radius of a tourist attraction probably did excellent business. 

The international side of the ledger is also picking up. Border authorities recorded 17.8 million cross-border trips during the holiday period. Around 460,000 foreign travellers entered China under visa-free policies, a 28.5% increase compared with last year’s daily average. Visitors from more than 160 countries and regions fanned out across over 300 Chinese cities, giving local tourism boards plenty to smile about. 

Entertainment kept pace with the travel boom. The Spring Festival film market generated RMB 5.75 billion ($834 million) in box office revenue, confirming once again that a good blockbuster pairs nicely with a week off work. 

Taken together, the latest Chinese New Year data highlights something less surprising but equally telling: the sheer scale of China’s holiday logistics machine. Moving billions of people across a country the size of a continent is no small feat, yet each year the system expands to absorb the demand. 

The numbers are a reminder that Spring Festival is not just a celebration. It’s one of the most complex seasonal mobilisations of people, infrastructure, and commerce anywhere in the world. 

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The campaign centres around a cast of internet-famous children, including variety show breakout stars and celebrity offspring. Instead of polished poses, they’re dropped into bite-sized mini dramas: a kid spy on a gift mission, siblings turning chess into psychological warfare, a bedroom reimagined as a full-blown dance stage. It’s less catalogue, more character study.  

It’s a smart take. The FILA KIDS Chinese New Year ad isn’t really in it to sell clothes. It’s more about pushing an identity. They back this up with neat loops between online and offline content too.  

FILA KIDS Chinese New Year ad: Extending the story offline 

FILA KIDS’ flagship at Beijing Universal Studios is presented more like a playground than a store. They have capsule toys, dance zones, photo moments – all designed for participation, not just purchase. It’s basically a family-orientated concept store.  

This campaign comes with the Beijing Flagships offer, taking this engaging retail experience to nearly 70 of China’s FILA KIDS stores in 45 cities by incorporating elements such as intangible cultural heritage-inspired activities, playful games, and New Year rituals adapted for children.  

You can’t forget IP 

The campaign is also gunning for long-term engagement. Recently FILA KIDS have been pushing the Wonnie Family, a cute crew of cartoon animals led by the bear-like Wonnie. They’re everything you’d expect: eye-catching, charming, and instantly recognisable.  

This IP has been splashed about the offline activations in a move to go beyond seasonal storytelling and into something more durable. Character IP allows the brand to build continuity across campaigns, products and environments. It is a shift from one-off messaging to a more cumulative form of brand building, where familiarity compounds over time.  

Closing the FILA KIDS Chinese New Year ad loop online  

The offline experience is extended into the digital world through a Douyin dance challenge built around these Wonnie characters. The mechanics are familiar and effective. Children engage with the brand in-store, recreate the experience online, and feed that content back into the broader campaign ecosystem. The result is a closed loop where physical space, social media and character IP are all reinforcing each other.  

This isn’t a new addition to the China marketing playbook, but its execution here feels particularly cohesive. Each layer of the campaign builds on the last, maintaining momentum across the extended holiday period.  

FILA KIDS: A brand built around child agency 

What FILA KIDS is ultimately responding to is not just Chinese New Year, but a generational shift. Gen Alpha consumers are growing up in a world defined by participation and performance. It’s the kind of rising of individualism we’ve seen across millennials and Gen Z in China but taking root at a much younger age.  

They’re becoming a children’s brand with the force of adult marketing. The result is a message that’s empowering. What the zhua ma campaign is really doing is encouraging kids that it’s fine to embrace the chaotic playful elements of your personality. Though you’ve got to wonder if the kids will actually spot it through all the playground-store activations and cuddly IPs. 

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The story marks a tonal shift from Apple’s earlier New Year narratives centred on family reunion. This time, the focus is on an accidental bond. The film follows an unremarkable office worker who reluctantly agrees to look after a colleague’s hamster. On her way, she encounters a lost dog, triggering a chain of small disasters: the hamster escapes, the dog confidently points her in the wrong direction, and everyday order dissolves into mild chaos.

It is only later that she realises the dog has been abandoned by its previous owner. In their shared isolation, the woman and the dog find comfort in each other, forming a relationship built on mutual healing rather than obligation. 

Shooting Apple’s Chinese New Year film on iPhone

From a production standpoint, Apple continues to foreground technical capability through narrative rather than specification. According to the filming team, features such as 8x optical-quality zoom and low-light performance allowed the crew to capture wide, cinematic scenes using a mobile device. Notably, this is the first Lunar New Year film Apple has shot entirely on the Pro model rather than the Pro Max, reinforcing the Pro line’s positioning for mobile filmmaking.   

Since debuting its first Lunar New Year short Three Minutes in 2018, Apple has made iPhone-shot Spring Festival films a fixed part of its China marketing calendar.

Notably, they are not the only brand to pivot away from family-centric storytelling or zodiac-rich imagery. What we’re seeing reflects broader changes in China’s marketing landscape, where emotional connections with a given audience increasingly sit alongside traditional ideas of reunion. 

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Rather than chasing sentimentality or symbolic overload, the retailer makes a quieter, more practical argument: New Year feeling comes from quality that actually shows up in daily life. 

The campaign avoids the usual reunion tropes. No tearful embraces, no overwrought voiceovers. Instead, Hema drops its products directly into familiar moments: pre-holiday stock-ups, time spent at home during the break, and the New Year’s Eve dinner table. The message is blunt and readable: shop at Hema, and you’re upgrading the Lunar New Year itself.   

Hema and their Lunar New Year campaign

What’s interesting is how Hema defines that upgrade. Adding more is split into two layers. The first is product-led. Through scenes built around health-focused selections, premium home banquets, global gift options and standout signature dishes, Hema positions itself as a supplier of genuinely better New Year goods, not novelty items dressed up in red packaging. 

The second layer is emotional, but without theatrics. By linking quality goods to realistic lifestyle needs – convenience, reliability, and taste – Hema frames care as something functional rather than symbolic. Feeling looked after becomes part of the product experience, not a narrative overlay. 

Operationally, the message is reinforced by execution. A synchronised New Year goods festival, 30-minute delivery via stores and front warehouses, and nationwide gift-box shipping address the logistical pain points that often drain the joy from holiday preparation. Hema’s message is astute: if New Year goods work better, the New Year feels better. Less ritual inflation. More lived-in warmth. 

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• The post-Spring Festival return to work coincides with Yushui, the second solar term in the Chinese lunar calendar.
• The food delivery platform Ele.me brings new significance to this traditional occasion by empathising with young workers toughing it out at office jobs.
• The younger generations’ interest in solar terms is increasing as they lend a “sense of ceremony” (仪式感) to the passing of the seasons.

This week marks the end of the weeks-long Spring Festival shutdown and the resumption of business as usual for offices across China. Like the first day back at work after Christmas or Blue Monday (the third Monday in January, said to be the most depressing day of the year by UK travel company Sky Travel), Monday February 18 was a slog for many Chinese. After the excitement of the festivities, the daily grind seems bleaker than usual. On top of that, Chinese workers have a six-day working week to contend with, a stipulation to make up for lost time.  

But this period has another meaning. Yushui (雨水, literally “rainwater”), is the second of the 24 solar terms that punctuate the Chinese lunar calendar. Beginning around February 18 and ending around March 4, Yushui traditionally marks the arrival of warmer temperatures, nourishing rain for crops, and the first stirrings of animal activity after a long, sleepy winter.

Capitalising on the growing popularity of solar terms in marketing, the food delivery platform Ele.me brings new significance to this occasion by empathising with young workers toughing it out at stultifying office jobs.

Teatime = break time

As the voiceover on Ele.me’s campaign advert explains, Yushui was historically a time set aside for reading and drinking tea as the heavy rainfall forced peasants to put down their tools and rest. Ele.me transposes this tradition onto the urban white-collar lifestyle, showing grey-tinted office scenes with despondent, sleepy workers.

Each scene of a depressed worker slurping tea in the office is paired with a quote from a famous 20th-century writer or philosopher. The quotes all reflect either a sense of malaise or a pleasure in doing nothing. Examples include “When Monday arrives, my soul is like a white fog” and “I believe that taking a break is legal”. From Kafka to Lu Xun, the quotations are shockingly fitting with the plight of the modern office worker and are humorously paired with jaunty bottleneck guitar music. The advert closes out with the line “It’s good to drink tea when it rains. When there’s tea, there’s rest.”

To encourage participation in this tea break – or “paid leave” as the advert terms it – Ele.me offered customers 50% off selected drinks between February 17 and 19. There were further chances to get involved online. On China’s Twitter-like platform Weibo, the first 10 users to repost and comment with their favourite type of milk tea each nabbed a 1000 RMB (139 USD) coupon. This sum could buy as many as 50 cups of bubble tea at the standard price, making it a small fortune for tea lovers and beleaguered workers.

Ele.me’s approach to seasonal marketing

Ele.me has been making strong efforts with seasonal marketing, especially around solar terms. Last year, the brand put on a concert for Qingming (Tomb-Sweeping Festival and the 5^th solar term) in April, marketing it as a “therapeutic party” for people to “lie down, relax, and eat Qingtuan” (a seasonal snack). Playing into the plight of office workers once again, mock-ups of annual leave request letters were provided at the event.

Then in December, the brand went viral on Weibo with its campaign for Dongzhi, the 22^nd solar term denoting the arrival of winter. In the advert, renowned writer Xu Zhiyuan delivers a treatise on why workers should take a day off for the winter solstice, with arguments like “because dumplings deserve a holiday of their own”. The topic landed on the platform’s Hot Search list and amassed more than 300 million views.

The younger generations’ interest in solar terms is increasing as they lend a “sense of ceremony” (仪式感) to the passing of the seasons, making them an excellent promotional framing for limited-time products and offers. By incorporating lesser-known ones like Yushui into creative campaigns, Ele.me is styling itself as a cultural educator for young people.

Brands against burnout

Ele.me’s Yushui campaign also hits at something troubling young people in China, who have not met with much sympathy in recent times despite their clear exhaustion and disillusionment. Hordes of fresh Chinese graduates are now finding they are qualified for white-collar jobs that simply aren’t there. But instead of meeting sympathy for grinding their way through the education system for little reward, the younger generation has been derided for being choosy. As youth unemployment soared last year, the state media lambasted the jobless, blaming their predicament on the fact they are “unwilling to engage in jobs that are lower than their expectations”.

While Ele.me’s advert does not engage explicitly with this issue, its incitement to take a break is a gentle pushback against 996 working culture, another major source of young people’s dissatisfaction. Young people in China have limited freedom to lash out publicly against the systemic sources of these problems. So when major brands like Ele.me advocate for rest, it tells young people they are still seen.

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But some do things a little differently. For a growing number of Chinese, mostly young professionals with white-collar jobs, chosen family trumps blood ties. This means ringing in the new year with those closest to them in their daily lives – their pets!

More than just kibble

China’s middle-class pet owners are not shy about how much they love their furry friends, and, for the pet economy, this is excellent news. As the product category most directly related to pets’ health and wellbeing, pet food has become increasingly “involuted” as China’s pet ownership has swelled. Pet owners the world over are accustomed to filtering their food shop search based on age range, health condition, flavour, and type (e.g. wet food vs. dry). But in China this is just the beginning. Seasonal treats and meal sets for different holidays are now becoming a way to show an extra level of devotion.

New Year’s dinner sets for pets are already an established product category. Online sellers stock options costing anywhere from 20 RMB (2.81 USD) to 300 RMB (42 USD), with the typical bundle including items like low-salt and low-oil dumplings (high salt intake can cause extreme dehydration in dogs), freeze-dried fish, and tangyuan – glutinous rice balls.

“Pets’ New Year dinners have been selling very well in the past few years,” an employee at Tian Qi pet food brand said. “We put out thousands of bundles tailored to cats and dogs on the shelves about a month before New Year. They pretty much sell out before Spring Festival begins.”

Searches for pet New Year’s dinners surged 102% this year, along with other categories like New Year clothing and couplets tailored to pets. This reflects the steady growth trajectory of China’s pet economy as a whole, which is expected to be worth 800 billion RMB by 2025. The pet food market more specifically is set to grow at a CAGR of 17% between 2021 and 2026, according to a Deloitte industry white paper.

Going viral

This year, the fad was further fuelled by one content creator on Xiaohongshu, China’s Instagram-like platform and trendsetting hub.

Going by the handle @OreoSimbaMiniBobo, an amalgamation of her pets’ names, this creator is a pet person to her core (referred to as “Ms Oreo” from here on out). Ms Oreo has been vlogging about her pets’ diets since 2021 and her bio reads: “Family of six: one person, two dogs, three cats. After a few months of sharing pet food content, her posts started averaging a few hundred views and her pet food arrangements developed an unmistakable aesthetic. These arrangments, usually tagged “immersive pet food assortment” (沉浸式宠物配餐), feature intricately decorated dog biscuits and brightly coloured fruit and veg heaped on top of various high-quality canned meats.

This year, her New Year’s Eve dinner vlog garnered over 1,000 likes, catching the attention of several local news outlets. Commenters praised Ms. Oreo saying the meal was her most beautiful yet and joking that they are jealous of her pets. The vlogs have even inspired the formation of a community of like-minded pet owners who can join a group chat to discuss the art of pet fine dining.

Now, the hashtag “Pet New Year’s Eve dinner” (#宠物年夜饭) has amassed 4.2 million views and 13,000 related posts on the platform, an impressive figure not befitting such a seemingly niche endeavour. Surely few would go to such lengths for their pets. After all, can the average dog or cat appreciate the aesthetic beauty and meticulous care encapsulated by such a lavish feast?

Part of the family

But owners don’t really care whether their pets feel the sensory or nutritional benefit of a painstakingly prepared meal. They derive pleasure in the act of preparing the food, arranging it beautifully, and then sharing it on social media. All this is a memento of their love for their pet and brings a “sense of ceremony”. This buzzword (仪式感 in Chinese）encapsulates contentment through small acts of creativity, which can be self-rewarding or generous to others. While pets probably won’t grumble if they don’t get a special meal on Spring Festival, for owners it can make all the difference, as the act of over-the-top effort is the most festive of all.

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All that has changed, with China’s weary post-pandemic tourists increasingly thrifty and drawn in by destinations closer to home. Hoping to offset the cost of international travel with the lure of convenience, Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore have all entered into visa-exemption deals with China in recent months.

For Singapore, these efforts might be starting to pay off. According to the latest data from Ctrip, China’s foremost online travel agency, bookings for trips to Singapore soared 960% year-on-year over the recent Spring Festival period. These travellers represent the first batch of Chinese tourists to make use of the new mutual visa-exemption deal between China and Singapore.

Since February 9, one day before the official start of the Lunar New Year, Chinese nationals have been permitted to travel visa-free to Singapore and stay for up to 30 days. Within just one hour of the announcement on January 25, searches for flights to Singapore on Alibaba-owned travel platform Fliggy increased over 15 times compared to the previous month, and the search volume for hotels increased by more than 6 times month-on-month.

All travel bookings for the first day of the holiday period jumped 102% compared to last year and far exceeded 2019 levels, offering hope of a full rebound for the tourism industry. However, projections for the rest of the year are slightly less upbeat. International travel from Chinese tourists is set to reach about 62% of pre-pandemic levels this year, according to Singapore-based digital marketing firm China Trading Desk.

Chinese tourists are increasingly allocating more funds to goods rather than services. This trend is expected to continue in the year ahead – welcome news for the travel and tourism industry. But with Singapore consistently ranked the most expensive city in the world, the visa waiver might not be enough to attract budget-conscious Chinese tourists. In fact, following the burst of Spring Festival travel to the city-state, many Chinese netizens have shared mixed reviews: they enjoyed their trip to Singapore but would not return simply due to the high costs of food, accommodation, and attractions.  

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• The classic Chongqing-founded toothpaste brand Leng Suan Ling enlists the help of renowned stage actor Pu Cunxin for this nostalgia-tinged Chinese New Year advert.
• Against the backdrop of China’s rapid pace of development, the advert celebrates the abundance of happiness in modern life.
• The advert draws a link between prosperity and healthy teeth through the idea of “desensitisation”, a play on Leng Suan Ling’s age-old tagline.

What makes the first day of the Lunar New Year special? The fact that it’s just like any other day, says Leng Suan Ling, China’s leading toothpaste brand for sensitive teeth and a holder of the rubber-stamped China Top Brand status since 2002.

Leng Suan Ling was established in 1987 in Chongqing, a Western China metropolis best known for its numbingly spicy flavours. Perhaps inspired by the hot cuisine of the region, Leng Suan Ling’s marketing angle has always been that with its products, you can eat anything you wish without fear of toothache – cold, hot, sweet, or sour, happy year after year (“冷热酸甜，幸福年年”).

For its 2024 Chinese New Year campaign, the classic brand enlisted the help of another cultural icon – Pu Cunxin, China’s most well-recognised stage actor. Pu lends his dulcet tones to this 4-minute advert that tugs on the heartstrings by reminding viewers just how much China has changed.

Then vs Now: Rationing happiness for Chinese New Year

In the opening shots of the advert, the 70-year-old actor pores over the pages of a photo album, and the viewer is transported back in time to 1992, where a bustling and snow-dusted Beijing hutong gets ready for the arrival of a new year. Moving through a life-filled house, Pu tells how in those days every special piece of clothing, every treat was saved assiduously, only to be enjoyed on that one most important day of the year. In 1992, China’s economic miracle was just beginning and memories of widespread suffering were not so distant. “Back then, we were always worried happiness would run out, so we squirrelled it away and waited until New Year to finally unwrap it like a gift”.

Returning to the present day, we see family members video call via smartphones and a young couple reuniting, having travelled by plane for the umpteenth time. These slices of life are intended to show how economic and technological development has washed away the scarcity mindset of less prosperous times, making life’s most precious moments more abundant: “These days happiness is no longer a New Year’s treat, but instead an item of daily use.” Pu concludes that his generation’s greatest source of happiness is that happiness doesn’t have to be rationed out, but can be found everywhere “like the rainwater and air”.

Finding beauty in the ordinary

In a time when the shine seems to have long worn off China’s economic miracle and many are positing that China will “get old before it gets rich”, it’s easy to feel nostalgic for the boom times of the 90s and early 2000s. Leng Suan Ling’s advert spins all that on its head. Conveyed effectively through the wisdom of a member of the older generation, this advert suggests we should recognise the objective richness of the present and see this as a cause for an inner, never-ending celebration.

Unexpectedly, this puts a positive spin on the idea of desensitisation, challenging the idea that being accustomed to something makes us feel it less keenly, or makes it less valuable. This is a clever conceptual play given that, as a brand specialising in anti-sensitivity toothpaste, Leng Suan Ling’s mission is to make sensations less intense, precisely so they can be enjoyed more.  The advert also describes happiness as a daily necessity or item of daily use (日用品). Again, Leng Suan Ling itself falls into this product category, so romanticising 日用品 as a metaphor for prosperity is an inventive way of enriching a seemingly mundane product with a much deeper meaning.

Ultimately, the advert is a return to the brand’s roots. Much as Leng Suan Ling has always wished you enjoy all of life’s flavours – cold, hot, sour or sweet – it wishes happiness accompany your every day, not just the first day of the year.

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This year, 480 million people are expected to make trips home for Spring Festival. This is 40% more than in 2022 when travel enthusiasm was still hamstrung by anxiety over COVID-19’s rapid spread.

But 春运 has been thrown into disarray as snowstorms and freezing temperatures have led to hundreds of flight and train cancellations. According to the BBC, around 225 cities in China have witnessed average daily temperatures consistently fall below 0◦C. Provinces in Central China including Hebei, Hubei, and Anhui are the worst affected, according to the Meteorological Administration, and at least 2 people have died. The Ministry of Finance and Ministry of Transport have issued 141 million RMB (19.6 million USD) to support snow and ice removal in the 11 worst affected provinces.

These are the most severe winter weather conditions since 2008, when the country suffered from a severe snowstorm that devastated parts of Guizhou, Hubei, Hunan, and Hebei and directly killed 129 people. Around 6 million passengers were stranded during that year’s Spring Festival migration as widespread power outages brought railway networks to a standstill.

On social media, Chinese netizens are sharing their snow-related travel hiccups, like photos of themselves stranded on highways. Beijing-based outlet Yicai Global reported that one driver was trapped in a car for 3 days and passengers heading to Wuhan were stuck on a train for hours with no power.

The freezing weather is forecast to dissipate on Friday just one day before Spring Festival officially begins, leaving little time for more far-flung travellers to reach their destinations in time for festivities.

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One local tea purveyor has found a clever way to incorporate cultural heritage whilst standing out from the crowd. The Shanghai-based tea brand Lelecha partnered with the hanfu clothing brand Shisanyu, uniting tradition and modernity in the run-up to the Year of the Dragon.

The Lelecha x Shisanyu campaign of course delivers a refreshing and luxurious new menu option for tea lovers.  The exclusive beverage is a bamboo-infused oolong tea, mixed with coconut milk and topped with chunks of fresh Dragon’s eye (a lychee-like fruit) and costs 19RMB (2.67 USD). Besides the themed beverage, there is also a host of Year of the Dragon exclusive gifts on offer, including a Shisanyu embroidered wall decoration and a set of Buddhist prayer beads.  

Hanfu is historical clothing from China’s Han dynasty era, which then evolved into a youth subculture in China during the mid-2010s. With the rise of more manifestations of guochao (China chic) – especially New Chinese Style fashion – hanfu has continued to grow in popularity (even some pampered pets get to wear it!).

Shisanyu jumped on the trend early – the brand was founded in 2016 when hanfu was still a niche activity reserved for enthusiasts and far from a common sight on China’s city streets. Since then, Shisanyu has risen to become the most well-recognised hanfu specialist, snatching up awards and major deals with the likes of Disney.

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