Update | China at rest: what Lunar New Year looks like through its most popular social media platform
The Lunar New Year holiday, or Spring Festival, is China’s most important holiday, and data from China’s social media giants highlights the habits of the nation at rest
Like Thanksgiving or Christmas in the US, the Lunar New Year holiday in China is a time for family reunions and catching up with far-flung relatives and friends. Hundreds of millions travel prodigious distances to get back home, so what do Chinese do during the five-day public holiday also known as the Spring Festival?
Messages and wefies
Users of Tencent Holding’s ubiquitous WeChat service, a social media-to-gaming platform, sent a lot of messages, both text and voice, and posted a lot of selfies and wefies, according to usage statistics released for the February 15 to 21 period by the company.
A total of 229.7 billion WhatsApp-like text messages were sent on the WeChat platform during the February 15 to 21 period, 2.8 billion Facebook-like postings were made and 17.5 billion minutes worth of voice recordings, the data shows. Most of that would have been congratulatory messages and well-wishes for the Spring Festival, and lots of photos of reunion dinners, New Year markets and group photographs with family and friends.
Virtual red packets