It wasn't long ago when every marketer in China was talking about ecommerce. Alibaba and JD battled it out for supremacy, and then another challenger, Pinduoduo, came from nowhere, and it became a three-horse race.Whilst the traditional ecommerce platforms still dominate online sales in China, the new world of livestreaming, KOLs and social commerce has dominated marketing forums over the past few years.

KFC's marketing success and then threatened boycotts provide valuable insights about marketing in China

Singles' Day grew again this year against all odds, with some interesting data indicating why

The 618 mid-year shopping festival is now in full swing and is breaking more records, which seems to happen with every subsequent online shopping festival these days in China. Yet one of the traditionally least-sexy components of ecommerce – delivery – has come to the fore this festival and captured our imagination.

Community Group Buying is shaking up grocery shopping in China with the big tech firms all investing heavily, providing lessons for marketers

Back in early 2018, a marketer working with Mercedes-Benz in the West included a Dalai Lama quote on their blocked-in-China Instagram account. There was an uproar in China and the car company issued an apology to the people of China and promised to deepen its employees understanding of Chinese culture and values. 18-months later, similar calls for mass-boycotts of brands in China were aimed at Disney, Coach, Versace, Givenchy, Calvin Klein, Fresh skincare and Japanese sportswear brand Asics for labelling Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macau as countries on T-shirts and other products.

Last time we looked, the end users in the bra category were almost always female. That’s why we were scratching our head, like many others, when we saw last week’s promotion from Chinese bra brand Ubras with the famous comedian Li Dan, a male.

Throughout the ages people have engaged in commerce to exchange goods and services for payment. Yet it wasn’t until around 1,100 BC when China introduced the first standardised currency. The money was miniature replicas of tools cast in bronze, before being replaced by more-practical, rounded metal pieces. This was followed by other iterations including leather, such as white deerskin bills a foot in length. Then around a thousand years ago, during the Song Dynasty, China introduced the world’s first paper money.

Beijing and Shanghai may be the first cities that most people associate with China, yet no city embodies the meteoric rise and confidence of modern China quite like Shenzhen in the south. Pre-China opening up, Shenzhen was described as a ‘backward fishing village,’ but after being designated as a Special Economic Zone (SEZ) in 1980, its proximity to Hong Kong’s entrepreneurs and capital, coupled with the ambition and scale of China’s migrant workforce have seen it transform into a dynamic metropolis at a scale that is unmatched in world history.

Tomorrow is the night that Chinese believe the full moon is at its brightest, shining on farmers for the mid-Autumn harvest. To celebrate, many of China’s 1.4 billion people will have hung lanterns and gifted sweet mooncakes filled with red-bean or lotus-seed paste. It is also the beginning of the much-anticipated 8-day national holiday.

China is notorious for its festivals, which are increasingly morphing into “themed shopping occasions.” When it comes to love, there are six official days on the calendar which fit the mould of the Western Valentine’s Day. Qixi, or the ‘Double Seven Festival’, on August 25 this year, is thought to be the most romantic and authentically Chinese. It celebrates a 2,000 year old love story with its roots in Chinese mythology; a mortal man, a goddess, forbidden love, talking oxen, astrological obstacles and bridges made up of magpies – all your ingredients for a powerful tale of romance.

$200 million. That's what China's fastest growing and second-most popular ecommerce platform Pinduoduo (PDD) invested in appliance and electronics retailer Gome last week.

If you're selling massage chairs in China, things are likely to be uncomfortably rosy at present. Online sales of chairs that mimic the hand motions of a massage therapist have shot up 436% from a year ago. From that chair, there's a good chance your customers are passing away the days indoors playing a lot more mobile games, flicking through short videos and watching about 42% more TV than they were a month ago.

Last April in the third-tier city of Nanchang, a man wanted for "economic crimes" was arrested from a crowd of 60,000 getting down to Cantopop legend Jacky Cheung. The 31-year old man had been pin-pointed from the sea of people walking into the stadium using facial recognition.

The first ten months of 2019 showed Chinese consumer spending is still chugging along, with retail growing at a healthy 8.1% (9% if you don’t include cars). This was further reinforced by last week’s Singles’ Day which saw purchases grow by 27% from last year’s festival.

With the curtain already up for this year’s Singles’ Day (the first without Jack Ma), expect to hear more about Alibaba over the next month. Done well, the Singles’ Day/Double-11 extravaganza can be a powerful event to raise awareness and trial of your hero products, and shift some large volumes.

In July 2017, Beijing set the target to make China “the world’s primary AI (Artificial Intelligence) innovation centre” by 2030. Whilst a detailed plan didn’t accompany the goal, it sent a message reinforcing how serious China is about AI. Such a signal is almost always accompanied by investment, policy and supporting regulations (or lack thereof) from Central Government. In early 2018, eagle-eyed Chinese spotted AI-related books on Xi Jinping’s bookshelf, highlighting that the mandate is being supported from the very top.

Out for a lunchtime stroll in most Chinese cities, you may not get that refreshed feeling you get elsewhere in the world. China’s carbon dioxide emissions have grown almost 150% since 2000. Although growth has flattened out this decade, emissions have crept 17% higher than in 2010 when Chinese power plants emitted as much nitrogen oxide as the rest of the world’s cars combined.