From the heart of Beijing to the edges of the global stage, you are at Roundtable.
I'm Niu Honglin.
Scenes of China's New Year.
Shopping used to be a resolve around crowded markets, fancy gift boxes and last-minute grocery runs.
Today, that picture increasingly includes livestream sales, overnight shipping and delivery trucks lining in front of residential compounds.
The spring festival consumer rush has been gradually migrated online as well, placing unprecedented pressure on China's logistics system at the most demanding moment of the year.
How is the industry coping and how come the industry is moving even to a greener manner?
For today's show, I'm joined by Yushan and Steve Hatherley.
Now pull up a chair and join the conversation.
The spring festival shopping season has always been the ultimate stress test for China's consumer market.
But today, the pressure isn't just on what people buy, but on how those purchases move and arrive.
As younger consumers ditch candy for smart appliances, IP tie-ins and pet gifts, booming online retail and record-breaking express deliveries have become the hidden engines of the Chinese New Year economy.
Behind the festive packaging and the overnight shipping lies a parallel transformation greener logistics, recyclable boxes and a delivery industry racing to keep up with both sustainability goals and holiday demand.
So as China's New Year shopping list goes digital and eco-conscious, can the express delivery industry deliver growth without downing in waste?
We'll be discussing so many factors, but to start with, we're shopping for spring festival period, and that tradition has been there for a really long time.
So let's paint a picture for those who are not familiar with this tradition huge shopping for festival kind of tradition or ritual here in China for so long.
Yeah, that's what we call the unfreezing of Andy Lau reaching 99%.
What?
I'm lost already.
You know Andy Lau, the pop singer and also a movie star?
What's the unfreezing of Andy Lau?
So here's the thing.
He's got a very well-known song that even one-year-olds in China probably can sing already.
It's about singing Good Fortune and Wish You a Happy Spring Festival.
It's Mariah Carey's All I Want for Christmas is You.
Something like that.
Exactly.
So that song is usually played in supermarkets around this time of the year.
And netizens just joke that...
Andy Lau is out.
He's starting to unfreeze 1%, 10%, 50%.
Now we're getting 99%.
So funny.
It's exactly the same thing with Mariah Carey's song.
So yeah, as the spring festival draws near, a strong festive atmosphere is taking shape across China.
Shoppers browse markets and supermarkets or even online shops, like I do, to carefully select New Year's supplies.
So this is what's going on around this time of the year, during the spring festival season, or even a bit before that.
We tend to have a bit of shorter of varieties when it comes to shopping or dining out, because you've probably already seen it out there, if you live in China, that some restaurants already shut down for the holiday season and everybody's returning home for the new year.
And also some markets and supermarkets.
They probably will shorten their business hours during the day as well.
So all of which makes purchasing before the festival something really important to do for Chinese families.
So that's why it's a huge deal for us.
Has it always been that way, where you'll have a little bit of flexibility with the supermarkets or restaurants or things like that?
Or was there a time when things just shut down completely?
I don't think China has shut down anything completely for anything forever.
We always have plans.
Well, have plans, options.
Even when it's like the most important holiday or festival of the year, there are definitely still supermarkets open, still major restaurant chains open.
It's just Especially in these years.
We see those places being overly crowded even during the spring festival period of time.
And also you want to prepare.
You want to carefully select gifts for your loved ones during the spring festival period.
And you also even want to have some gifts in stock, just in case you suddenly want to visit someone during the holiday.
Or someone stops by.
Yes, that too.
Oh, wow.
Really?
Oh, so you keep extra gifts on hand just in case you need them for somebody.
Yeah, because in China, when you visit someone, you bring gifts, and more often than I realized before the show.
Especially if it's relatives and if it's an older generation, they will definitely ask you to take something from their home, as well as a return of gifts.
So that happens a lot.
And, of course, during the holiday days.
You want some snack to you know.
Enjoy during the holiday period.
That happens.
For some people it's something serious and they would very carefully select that bunch of snacking stock as well.
Culture question.
So if I just show up at your house during the holidays like hey, it's Steve, just popped over to say hello.
What is an appropriate gift for me to bring in that situation?
Would it be like a box of snacks or some fresh fruit or what would be a culturally appropriate gift during the spring festival?
You just mentioned two very common gifts.
Yeah, that's it.
Nuts, fruits.
Sometimes people bring liquor or flowers, too.
And these days, I guess, for kids, somebody I remember, distant family members, also bring toys for the kids.
A little toy for the kids.
Yes, something like that.
Yeah.
So traditionally we would, for example, purchase for daily essentials, like traditionally, like 20, 30 years ago, you would prepare extra rice and cooking oil and meat and pickled meat as well, different types of food and material for the major meals you're about to cook.
And then there are, you know, social and indulgent treats we talked about candies, we talked about cookies and for different types of snacks and even, like you said, alcohol.
And then you have the healthier types of snacks, like nuts and different types of things that you can enjoy.
Candy, I was reading, was a really, really big one in the past the spring festival holiday sales where people would buy their candy either for themselves or as gifts, or lying to themselves, saying they're buying it for a gift but actually buying it for themselves.
I'm joking, of course.
That makes up or made up over 40% of a company's yearly revenue.
That's the major time.
That level of candy would get sold during the spring festival time.
The funny thing is those very traditional, commonly recognized kind of commodities are no longer the major choices these years.
Yeah, somehow people start to realize that maybe not too much candy on the table, even though that's been the tradition for many years.
Because well, in 2023 China's candy market kind of shrank a little from 90 billion yuan back in 2017 to 85 billion yuan in 2023.
And people now prefer other choices, such as what you mentioned, the nuts, which are healthier, and it's also chosen by nearly 46 of shoppers, according to a survey.
More expensive, but definitely much, much affordable nowadays, comparing to 20 years ago.
The nuts, you mean?
Yes because, if you think about it, the reason that many families would have some candy on the dining table or just on a table in a living room is for kids.
When kids arrive with their parents and wish you a good, happy new year, you want to give them something that are harmless, that they will enjoy, and 20, 30 years ago, when i was a kid, it was always candy, because you don't really get that many candy in usual in other days other than the holiday days, and also it's Something again, affordable.
But definitely nuts would be a good choice for kids as well.
It's just nowadays it's much more affordable for a common family.
Here's a strategy.
If you don't want the kids to eat all your snacks, put a bowl of I don't know, put a bowl of asparagus on the table.
Asparagus?
Yeah, kids aren't going to eat that, are they?
That is a strange strategy, especially in spring festival period.
Well, if nuts are expensive or candy's expensive, then you can save some money there.
Milk used to be a big gift culturally.
Is that correct as well?
Yeah, especially if you're visiting someone like elders or someone older than you.
You bring milk as a gesture of wishing good health for them.
And also...
This year we mentioned nuts, but it's not only the healthy foods that's popular among people nowadays in the spring festival shopping season, but also smart home appliances and China chic cultural products.
And they're all growing.
And, speaking of China, chic cultural products.
I found this so bizarre that two unexpected trends are kind of stealing the spotlight lately.
One is the anime-inspired or ACG products and the other one is the good fortune-themed consumption, meaning that you know the god of wealth being pasted on the wall or being decorated somewhere.
Wouldn't that be every year, though?
Previously, I don't remember that being a trend, but nowadays that seems to be it.
And we have a lot of designers now painting or creating the god of wealth in a lovely, lovely way, so that it got even more attractive during the past couple of months or year.
If you're familiar with the situation here in Beijing, the subway stations, to be more precise in Wukong.
It's a subway station near our station.
Right um, there is a little shop themed the god of wealth.
It's like magnets postcards, everything's decorated in the color gold and red, and you can even buy lottery tickets right next to that, you know, god of wealth shop perfect place to buy it.
It's a fun thing to do.
It's not like people veal wealth as their top priority, as their life goal.
It's more like it's a fun thing and it's an auspicious thing to have around festival time.
I think I get it.
So the god of wealth has always been here, culturally speaking, always important, maybe during the spring festival time.
But now the designs have gotten really cool and trendy.
So the products that are coming out, related to the god of wealth, are selling quite well.
Let's say, in the ancient times people, they go to a temple and they give incense, offer incense and wish for a good fortune and good luck for it for the entire new year.
But nowadays that's been simplified, and also brands, they're also simplified.
Simplified to the fact that a decoration will equally work as people believe, or maybe people don't really care whether or not it'll work, like saying oh, I have paid tributes to the God of Wealth.
Well, give me a very prosperous year.
It's not about that.
It's just good luck and something fun.
And it's about taking part in the holiday.
Definitely.
And it's very inspiring to see that brands they're both joining and kind of getting creative with it too.
So they offer God of Wealth snack gift boxes and also limited edition milk.
You see people are still offering milk, just painting different icons on it.
And also there's chocolate, fortune towers and festive pastries, lucky figurines sweaters, drink cans and gold charms.
So everything is wrapped in symbol of luck, wealth and blessing at this time of the year and it's very popular among people.
It's very reasonable if you think about it.
Those who are born during the year 1995 and 2009 have become adults.
They are the decision makers now.
They buy things according to their will and they like cute little things, things with good ornament, and also they like to pay for good emotional value attached to the products.
And if you think about the business owners or the product creators, they have tried to improve the quality of it.
They have tried to improve the health level of their product.
And now they finally have some time to make the packaging also auspicious.
I don't know how much time they have because the supply chains are particularly busy this year.
I found this quite fun.
Orders for Zodiac themed cultural products have increased about 200% year on year.
We talked about it, didn't we, on Roundtable, the cry-cry horse?
Yes.
Yeah, that gained great popularity.
And yeah, people are buying a lot of these things too.
So the factories that are pumping out these cute little plush toys, they're very busy too.
And one trend that has been here in China for quite a while was would be the fact that, instead of getting all the things that you want for the festival in a market, we are getting those things online.
Yeah because, young consumers, we're blending online and offline experiences.
And also, this is a 2026 spring festival consumption report, which shows that 74 percent of consumers see the holiday as a time to recharge, making immersive, Festive shopping environments especially appealing to people like us.
And based on a personal experience, I think, those online platforms they really paid their efforts to try to make everything, including their front page decoration, their icon shown on your phone and everything looks so appealing and red and festive so that you know when you see it you are more inclined to tap on it and see what's offered and maybe even make a purchase just because of that.
Even the government has noticed that people are well, of course, it's easy to notice, but paying attention to the fact that, since we are already purchasing during this period of time, might as well give some profits, give some discounts and have some incentives, even in a national campaign kind of way, like Happy Shopping 2026, allowing online platforms to roll out different types, to launch different types of discount campaign in different platforms, so that you can enjoy the shopping season even more.
Would that apply to a bunch of different things like food ordering or tech purchases or just whatever?
It depends.
I think for different types of grocery you're buying different types of items you would be able to enjoy different types of discounts.
And coverage is varying a bit depending on where you are in China too.
And during those period of time, we would be opening or tearing up a lot of delivery boxes, which leads to a issue that we think about sometimes.
That is, with so many packaging, so many tapes, so many particles, are we creating too much garbage for the planet?
Well, you said the government was paying attention to one thing.
They're also paying attention to this.
This was part of the 14th five-year plan period for 2021 to 2025.
New technologies for express delivery packaging and innovative recycling and reuse methods.
They've been continually improving and continually emerging.
The entire industry has nearly fully implemented electronic shipping labels, or waybill, and reusable transfer bags.
The standardization rate for packaging itself reached 86%.
The number of layers in packaging boxes and the thickness of packaging bags.
Those have been reduced by more than half.
Tape width, they also paid attention to that.
It's been cut by 25%.
And also, smart packing algorithms have reduced material use. by almost 20%.
And then on top of that, 10 of same city deliveries within the same city.
They now use recyclable and reusable packaging.
And over 800 million cardboard boxes are recycled and reused annually.
I was watching from Shenzhen a drone food delivery.
Someone ordered a bubble tea and it got delivered by drone, which caught my attention.
That's cool.
It was in the middle of a park and anyway, the cool thing was um, when the drone came down and dropped off the package into this kind of like, it drops it off on top of what looks like a vending machine and then a door on the top of the vending machine opens and your package drops down.
And then when she the person in the video took the package out, it was packed in a box and the bag that you typically get takeout for your bubble tea was inside another box.
Now you might be thinking, oh, that's a whole lot of extra packaging, right?
Well, first of all, you need to because of the drone delivery.
But second of all and this is the point I want to make that box immediately gets recycled at the delivery station.
You take the bag out of the box and you put the box back into the delivery station for recycling, because those would be expensive too, wouldn't they?
It makes a lot of sense because if you take a look at the online shopping market here in China and around the world, it's Inevitable to see more and more packaging.
Actually, according to the National Postal Work Conference held by the State Post Bureau recently, the volume of postal delivery services in China surpassed 216 billion parcels in 2025.
That is already a 11.5% year-on-year increase.
We are only going to see more and more and more of these boxes, of the tapes, of all of this.
China is the largest online retail market and it has been for the last 13 years or so.
So it continues to grow and that is why, only um, even several years ago, more than five years ago, people started to the government started to pay attention, to evolve or improve the situation of the boxes, making sure that yes, we cannot avoid having more of those delivery boxes, packaging boxes, but we can first of all improve the situation of what we call excessive packaging.
Yeah, excessive packaging is something I personally found really troubling.
And if you just look at the survey that's been done recently, you will know that many people, including me myself, we are aware of the fact that a lot of our parcels that we are receiving is overly packaged.
So that's back in the 2022 Consumer Perception Survey conducted by China Consumers Association that they discovered that over 80 of consumers opposed excessive packaging and over 50 of consumers noticed excessive packaging issues, while about 34 purchased products they suspect were overpackaged.
However, that's not enough, because consumer awareness of excessive packaging can also be improved, even upon the 80 coverage we've already mentioned.
And because the report says that only 34 of consumers understand the correct criterion of excessive packaging and only about 78 of consumers are familiar with the criteria for judging excessive packaging.
So this is what I do.
If I open a a package, a box, wherever it comes from.
And I found that multiple layers of, nowadays it's more paper than plastic gas filled kind of wraps.
But if I see more layers and they're still seemingly clean and reusable, I have a bag that's particularly for putting those things in, so that in the future if I want to mail something, I can reuse that to wrap the things I want to mail out.
And that's also something that I found really interesting that these days the delivery company not food delivery, but parcel delivery companies.
They do not offer free packaging for you anymore.
I'm not sure just when exactly that started, but apparently you need to wrap it yourself before mailing things out.
And those excessive packaging is In my case, helping me to make things easier.
And when I order a cheeseburger and there's extra ketchup packets, I put it in the fridge for later use.
So I'm also doing my part, Yushan.
See, we are taking things into our own hands.
But the government is also rolling out a lot of different policies making sure that unnecessary packaging materials and unnecessary packaging steps are being omitted.
And that's something I heard that happened not too long ago.
At the end of 2025.
I believe there was a press conference held by the State Post Bureau and where the director of the market regulation department highlighted that in recent years they have introduced three regulations, 15 standards and nine policies aligned with green principles to support the green transformation of express packaging and postal services.
So the express delivery interim regulation would be one of these relatively newer regulations that started to implement since June last year, and that one introduced a dedicated chapter on express packaging, and it aims to build a green, energy efficient delivery service.
So this is what it does.
The regulation covers the entire packaging lifecycle, from design and production to use, recycling and disposal.
So this whole process is providing an institutional guarantee for departmental and regional and even policy coordination, like avoid excessive packaging in the future.
The State Post Bureau is also involved.
They have a couple of mandatory national standards.
One is limits on heavy metals and specific substances in express packaging, and the other is requirements for limiting excessive packaging.
They're working together with other departments eight other departments, as a matter of fact to support this green transformation, if you will, of express packaging and make the whole situation better for the plant.
When the policy points out a direction, we see all different types of forces from the company side, from the delivery company side, from the side of relevant scientists.
They all move toward that direction.
For example, if this is a delivery company and they're shipping huge household appliances for another company that are the manufacturer company of that household appliance?
Yes, as a delivery company.
What I'm thinking is that oh, I should package that parcel again so that I don't break it on the road, so that I do not have to pay for that break.
Yet if I can team up with the manufacturer factory of that huge TV huge but fragile TV I no longer need to have a secondary packaging.
And that is what is happening.
For example, in the province Zhejiang province, by 2025, nearly 96 of e-commerce packages no longer require secondary packaging.
So that's from the packaging company's point of view.
As for scientists, they're also thinking about fun new ways.
One funny example I realized is or I noticed is that If you like the fruit lychee, you would find that in Chinese people's perspective, lychee is a really hard to transport kind of fruit.
Since ancient times, yes.
In ancient times, of course.
So when a fresh lychee is harvested from the tip of the branch, after one day you feel like huh, it's no longer smelling that appealing.
In two days, it's like, hmm.
It looks less appealing.
And the third day you will feel, huh, it tastes less fresh.
That's because one, you harvest the lychee and you put it in a bag.
The lychee is breathing.
And when it's breathing, it's also ripening to an extent that it's a bit too mature and it loses the freshness that you would desire.
And what happened used to be that you package it in a box and paired it up with a lot of fruit, different types of chemicals, sealed in a bag so that it can be kept in a lower temperature to prevent it from overly breathing.
But scientists have been doing research and putting in the kind of material that only allow a smaller amount of oxygen to get into the box so that with not enough oxygen the lychee cannot breathe that much and cannot see, cannot ripe that much.
So that is these.
This is only one example of newly developed technology as well as material can reduce the amount of material that actually requires during the shipping of different types of things.
Yeah, lychees are screaming, ah, Sounds cruel, doesn't it?
Some of these changes, too, don't seem like they would be a really big deal, but they are.
A lot of express companies now, they're using a narrower tape than they used to.
Some are using 45 millimeters or less, and some are even using 30 millimeters or less.
And that can increase the tape usage over time of about 30 if you continue using those wider numbers.
So every little tiny change they can make... is being made.
Cardboard layers are being reduced from five layers down to three layers.
They're still strong because of what you mentioned, technological upgrades.
So they're able to work on how to make it stronger and use less of it.
So it's a good thing. when it comes to technological upgrade, we are also seeing different examples.
For example, here in Hainan.
In Hainan being the first province in the country to use fully biodegradable express packaging bags in postal and express delivery industry and major courier companies have actively adopted this initiative, meaning that all of the material that are used are also biodegradable.
So, no matter if you're using it as a single use material, single use box, or you're using it several times, it still won't post a huge pressure on the planet.
But even with that, there's still challenges that's met in the process.
We've already hit such a benchmark in making progresses to make this whole transportation route more green.
But there are still challenges, such as the high cost for green transformation and also an imperfect recycling system that we currently have in some of the regions.
And this is said by Lu Bo, the deputy director of the Hainan Provincial Degradable Plastics Technology Innovation Center.
So he suggests that we in the future can create a three-tier network of express delivery stations residential, community recycling points and professional recycling enterprises.
So the three steps all collaborating together to achieve a closed loop recycling system for express packaging waste.
That sounds very scientific and very well organized.
And encouraging for those of us who are still doing our spring festival period purchasing.
So in this time we can do it with a little less burden in our heart, thinking that oh, even though we're buying so many things in all these delivery boxes To our doorstep, we're not posing that huge of a burden to the planet.
Did you do your shopping yet, both of you?
Or are you waiting for the last minutes?
I have been doing my shopping for at least a month and I'm still doing it.
You're using the whole 40 days, huh?
I definitely am.
Collect all the coupons.
I'm doing that, by the way.
And we will enjoy the things that we buy for the upcoming spring festival.
