A lot can happen in a year in China, and 2014 is a testament to that. It was the year China’s face-kinis went global, girls with armpit hair went viral and Yao Ming’s campaign to save sharks helped fin soup sales dive 82% since 2012. Over the past 12-months, China surpassed Japan to become the world’s second largest advertising market, with spending on online ads usurping television ads for the first time.

Christmas, the biggest celebration in the Western hemisphere, has spread its wings to China. Hotels and shopping malls compete in ostentatious decoration, from exuberant Christmas trees to unique Chinese-style garlands. Fairy lights added to the usual spectacle on China’s skyscrapers are mingling to a sparkling scene.

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.

The long awaited China-Australia Free Trade Agreement (ChaFTA) was recently signed. The China FTA joins Australia’s other recently signed FTAs with South Korea and Japan. Together, the three countries covered by these agreements account for more than 61% of Australia’s exports of goods and services. The clock is ticking to take full advantage of the unique opportunities afforded by the new agreement.

Fruits, milk formula, rice, chicken nuggets, rat meat, abalone and goose feet have a fateful common feature: They have all been featured in the Chinese headlines for food scandals. Now bean sprouts from a Beijing production site are on the top of the list due to the latest discovery of the bean sprouts containing banned additives. Food safety is a major concern in China where products with forbidden add-ins are regularly discovered. While in 2008 only 12% of Chinese claimed food safety to be a problem, this amount grew almost seven-fold to 80% in 2014 according to Horizon Research.

Mín yǐ shí wéi tiān, the famous Chinese proverb meaning “Food is the God of the people,” has been used for generations. The definition of that God is changing rapidly for many Chinese.

About one in 3 cigarettes worldwide are smoked in China. According to the Global Adult Tobacco Survey in China, almost one third of the adult population smokes, with 53% of all men. The number of Chinese smoking grew by 100 million between 1980 and 2012. Whilst health may be the number one concern for the Chinese consumers, there remains a large portion of the population who choose to smoke.

Big data is a buzzword that gets bandied around a lot these days, and with good reason. When companies like Google, and more recently Baidu, can uncover flu outbreaks from spikes in web searches long before health agencies become aware, you know you’re onto something good.

2015 is the big year when Disney’s sixth resort destination is expected to open in Shanghai. Answering the demand of the growing affluent Chinese middle class for leisure and entertainment offers, Disney invested $ 5.5 billion in its new theme park. According to PricewaterhouseCoopers, growth in China’s entertainment market will more than double between 2013 and 2015 to $148 billion. This reflects the expectations of China’s theme park visitations rising to 221 million by 2020, matching the current size in the US.

The China-U.S. Climate agreement signed at Apec last week is a positive step for the world, and China in particular. The unfortunate reality is that even if the commitments are delivered, China’s pollution will continue to worsen until 2030. Beijing’s toxic environment – earlier this year labelled ‘almost uninhabitable for human beings‘, will continue to edge towards the unliveable, along with many other parts of the country.

This year’s 11.11, not only Chinese profited from the discounts. Alibaba’s international shopping platform AliExpress offered free shipping to overseas which consumers abroad made use of in large scale, processing more than 6.8 million paid orders. Surprisingly, Israel was among the Top-3 buyers, whereas the USA only ranked No. 6 as cross border commerce takes off on both directions.

Fancy buying a Xiaomi smartphone online in China? If you’d done it yesterday, you would have joined more than a million others who collectively spent ¥1 billion ($163 million) buying Xiaomi gadgets by noon. That was Singles’ Day – the largest online shopping festival on the planet, by far.

The centre of Singles' Day is the Alibaba HQ in Hangzhou in the Yangtze River Delta close to Shanghai. The stunning 164,000 square metre campus is Googleplex-style, with Chinese characteristics. 14,000 of Alibaba's 33,000 workforce are based there, and a large share of the 11,000 staff working on Singles' Day. Just an hour out from another historic day of online shopping, the campus was unexpectedly relaxed, indicating just how honed Alibaba has their annual shopping festival after six years.

On the strike of midnight on 11 November 2014 it all changed. The calm became a frenzied storm of clicks and taps from all over China, with consumers from the mega cities to the rural villages forgoing sleep to get the first and best deals for the Singles’ Day online shopping festival.

Back in 2011, most of the cool kids in China were sporting foreign-branded Apple, Samsung and Nokia phones, with the three brands accounting for 57% of all smartphone sales. By June this year, eight of the top-10 selling brands were Chinese. Local darling Xiaomi, which released its first smartphone just three years ago, now outsells every other brand – foreign and local – in the Mainland.

Batten down the hatches! China’s GDP growth is expected to slow to 7.2% this quarter year-on-year from 7.5%. While those growth rates would have most countries salivating, it is not quite the blistering expansion that China has enjoyed since last millennium. Couple that with luxury sales, which are expected to decline 1% in the Mainland this year, and house prices dropping 1.3% in September – the sector’s first yearly fall, and things don’t sound overly positive.

Few segments represent the dizzying rise of China and its unique characteristics like eCommerce. In addition to breathtaking growth rates, online shopping is fundamentally altering consumer behaviour across both online and offline channels, from product research to purchasing.

WeChat’s global ambassador, Lionel Messi, was in Beijing last week for the all star football clash between Argentina and Brazil. What should have been a celebration of the beautiful game, turned out to be a demonstration of China’s abominable pollution.