In 2013, there were 2.9 million U.S. Dollar millionaires in China. They were 38 years old on average. 12-months later, following a year of slowing GDP growth, low to negative house price movements in most cities, and the end of double digit growth for most luxury brands, more than one million Chinese millionaires have joined the ranks. It is another indicator of the continued growing affluence of individual Chinese.

Earlier this month, Apple’s Tim Cook and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi opened accounts on Weibo. Modi’s selfie with Premier Li Keqiang and Tim Cook’s chronicles of his four day trip to China, helped attract almost a million followers between them, providing further validation of Weibo’s relevance in China.

New Balance has done some great work positioning itself as an aspirational, but affordable fashion brand in China. It’s hard to walk a block in China’s hipper urban suburbs without seeing young fashionistas sporting NB shoes. But for those sitting in the Boston HQ, that success would have been slightly tarnished by the recent ruling that New Balance’s Chinese brand name, XīnBǎiLún, was violating a Guangdong businessman’s trademark.

109 million Chinese tourists travelled ‘abroad’ last year – a particularly impressive number given just 31 million did so in 2005. Yet, what many reports don’t highlight is that more than two thirds of those travellers were visiting Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan.

Last week in Beijing, free Wifi was rolled out across 12,000 of the city’s buses. It’s great news for the millions of Internet-obsessed commuters in the capital, but also relevant for tourism operators in the West.

Group travel has been losing its shine for some time with Chinese tourists. Research by TNS last August found that 62% of Chinese tourists would prefer to travel independently. This has been backed up by countless anecdotes from tourism operators, and recent spending analysis from Union Pay which points to a healthy rise of independent Chinese travel abroad.

China’s biggest holiday has come and gone. The festivities were filled with the usual orchestra of pyrotechnics, red paper cut-outs symbolising good fortune, and reunited families huddling together with one eye on CCTV’s Spring Festival Gala and the other on their smartphones.

We only need to look as far as Chinese consumer’s online search habits to get an idea about what’s on their minds. One of the interesting outtakes from China’s top Baidu search terms in 2013 was the focus on investments.

With Christmas upon us next week, this is the last Skinny for 2013, providing a good opportunity to reflect on the year that was. It’s difficult to do justice to China’s past 12-months by squeezing them into a few paragraphs, but we’ve done our best.

China can be a tough place to be a youngster. As the only child in most cases, they are the single hope for their parents and two sets of grand parents, to be successful, marry well, and make their fortune to provide for their elders in their latter years.

There are new stats and figures coming out about China every day. They are often staggering, and regularly inconsistent. China’s diversity and opaqueness means there’s often a few stray figures, but after studying enough China research and data, consistent trends and themes do come through.

If you were to take a straw poll asking how the Internet is changing the way Chinese consumers buy products and services, the majority of people would likely make reference to online shopping.

Welcome back to our China readers, we hope you had a good break. If peak hour crowds at People’s Square or Xizhimen subway stations are your thing, then let’s hope you managed to get out to see some of China’s tourist attractions over the golden week just passed.

The cases are packed. The flights, trains and buses are booked, and the cars have had a polish, in what will be another period of Chinese tourism en masse. Aside from the Spring Festival, there’s no bigger movement of Chinese travellers than the Mid-Autumn Festival and National Day-Golden week combo which starts tomorrow.

It wasn’t long ago when virtually all Chinese consumers assumed the more expensive a product, the better quality it must be. Marketers would create premium brands just by raising prices, and in many cases, they’d actually sell more than if their prices were lower.

Outside of China’s once-every-four-year Olympic gold medalists, China is starved of global sports stars. When one of their own does make it, the patriotic Chinese are quick to elevate them to Messiah status, with the riches inevitably following. Much of the NBA’s runaway success in China can be attributed to Yao Ming’s presence in the league, which helped him become one of China’s youngest yuan billionaires. When Li Na won her first Grand Slam title at the 2011 French Open, almost overnight, sponsorship deals saw her become the 2nd highest paid sportswoman in the world and tennis’ popularity soared in China.

Another week and a big week for the folks at Sina Weibo. Figures released this week announced that as at June 30, there were 368 million registered Weibo users, showing healthy growth in spite of well publiched censorship-blips on the service. Chinese users realize this is a necessary evil of using Weibo and it seems to have had little impact on the Weibo's increasing influence for China consumers.