Videos of African children giving personalised birthday greetings – sold on Chinese e-commerce websites – divide opinion
Popular in Hong Kong, video greetings are marketed by middlemen for as little as US$14; have vendors checked children are not being exploited, a human rights researcher asks, but a business ethicist sees nothing inherently wrong
For her 23rd birthday, Cherry Cheung received a peculiar gift from her friend – a video of a dozen black children chanting birthday wishes to her in heavily accented Mandarin, singing her a birthday song and dancing to disco music.
“I initially thought it was Photoshopped, but then I realised they are indeed shouting my name,” says Cheung, whose friend bought the personalised, 39-second video on Taobao, an online e-commerce platform in China, for 288 yuan (US$45). Taobao is a unit of Alibaba Group, owner of the South China Morning Post.
Such services have been around Taobao and WeChat, a Chinese social media platform, for years. But the trend recently took off in Hong Kong, where social media users post on Facebook and Instagram the videos they receive as gifts or buy themselves.
Prices start at 90 yuan (US$14) for a short video in which children chant a 10-character personalised message, while a 30-second clip featuring a 20-character message, dancing and singing costs up to 300 yuan. As well as having children chant a message, you can choose “African mercenaries” firing blanks from guns, or Russian girls in minidresses who dance.
China’s Generation Z is hooked on these short video apps
Customers can receive their videos within 24 hours of ordering them, according to one seller based in Tianjin, a city in northeast China. The videos are shot by colleagues of his in the southern African countries of Malawi, Zambia and Angola, and in Russia, he says.
