Official weibo: http://weibo.com/u/3476904471
星期一你下了多少个单？喂喂喂，带金丝边眼镜的那个，不要看别人，问的就是你。。
不知道从啥时候开始，曾经天朝宅男用来自嘲的双11光棍节变成了全民网购的疯狂日子，每年这个时候大家见面打招呼的第一句话就是“今天你买什么啦？”，由于AceJ今年对光棍节电商销售额的贡献值为0，特发“Anti-valentine day & E-commerce”专题一篇，望全国人民海涵
P.S. Jack Ma 曾说过，我就干了两件事，在西湖边练了10年英语和打太极（牛人都爱这么说），AceJ表示从来没有听过Jack童鞋的英文Presentation，但现在我可以告诉各位，相当有范。什么？你不知道Jack Ma是谁？就是让你每天告诫自己远离淘宝，珍爱生命，却又经常手贱下单的那位。
Part I: Speaker
Article 1
[Rephrase 1]
China E-Commerce
[Speech, 44:22]
Source: Youku
http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XNTMwNjg1MTk2.html
Part II: Speed
Article 2
Online Shoppers Went Crazy during China's Anti-Valentine's Day Protest Holiday
By Joe Weisenthal
[Time 2]
Monday was "Single's Day" in China.
What's Single's Day you ask? Our Haley Peterson described it last week as essentially a protest to Valentine's Day. Instead of celebrating your love, you celebrate being single. It started in the 1990s. And like all holidays, it's now become a gigantic excuse for shopping and sales. In fact, it's the single biggest one-day online shopping day anywhere in the world.
Xinhua.com describes the activity this year:
Taobao.com, a key sales platform under Alibaba Group, operator of China's biggest e-commerce platforms, launched a shopping festival on its consumer-oriented platform, Tmall.com, highlighting big discounts on Singles' Day. Journalists from more than 200 news outlets waited at the data broadcast hall of the company's headquarters in east China's Hangzhou City early Monday morning to witness its sales data soaring on a huge electronic screen.
The applause roared as revenues topped 10 billion yuan at 6 a.m., when more than 100 million consumers had placed orders via the online portal.
On the same day last year, it took 13 hours for the company's sales to top the 10-billion RMB benchmark.
[183 words]
Q1: How many less hours did this year spend to reach 10 billion RMB sales?
Source: Yahoo Finance
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/online-shoppers-went-crazy-during-095735384.html;_ylt=AwrTWf2xaIRShBcAWviTmYlQ
Article 3
Bare branches
By A.A.
[Time 3]
ONE is the loneliest number, and 11/11 the loneliest date. November 11th was Singles’ Day in China, known as “Double Eleven” or “Bare Branches” day—a Chinese term for bachelors. In a country where males outnumber females by 34m and often struggle to achieve the kind of income deemed necessary to attract a partner, those single souls have plenty of company.
In recent years, Singles’ Day has become largely an online shopping festival. Aware of the size of the single population (and of its relative spending power, in the absence of families to support), from midnight each November 10th retailers offer discounts that attract huge numbers of consumers—single or not. This year according to state media, within the first 55 seconds 100m yuan ($16m) worth of discounted goods were sold online, with a billion yuan spent within 6 minutes and 7 seconds, and 6.7 billion yuan in the first hour.
Figures released by Alibaba, a large Chinese e-commerce retailer, say the most popular product was the Xiaomi brand of mobile phone, with over 550m yuan worth whisked off the virtual shelves. Underwear is always another popular choice, and this year 1.6 million bras sold before noon. When the tills closed, the estimated value of the day’s retail therapy totaled 35 billion yuan.
Besides online sales mania, and a bump in spam text messages from dating websites, there were also singles’ events for those using the occasion to try to find a date. At one singles’ club in Beijing, the Happiness Culture Member’s Club (“The Home of Single Friends”), 150 singles registered with their identity cards for a speed dating event. The evening included the “500-second game,” in which the gents circled a ring of seated ladies and stopped at random, in the style of musical chairs, to have an eight-minute conversation with the person opposite. A simpler variant had both sexes take opposite ends of a bundle of entangled strings, then unravel them through much contortion—no letting go allowed—to discover who the next eight-minute date would be.
[340 words]
Q2: According to figures from Alibaba, what was the proportion of the most popular brand’s market share?
[Time 4]
The club, one of three in a chain established in Beijing in 2003, targets young professionals in their mid- to late-twenties, though there are also members in their thirties and forties. The organizer of the event, Liu Lei, said such singles’ organizations and websites existed “not because it’s popular, but because it’s necessary,” talking of a “market need” for singles with good incomes but no time to look beyond their immediate circle for potential spouses.
The open goal of such get-togethers is marriage, not just a dinner date. The first and most salient information to be exchanged concerns age, height, background and job. That holds true for the broader dating culture in mainland China, where the pressure is on men first to own an apartment and a car before they can find a wife. At “marriage markets” in China’s bigger cities, it is often a bachelor’s parents who present the relevant details to those parents shopping for a husband for their daughter. Dating websites and matchmaking companies are widespread, alongside odder methods for finding a girlfriend without risking rejection—such as the occasional habit of some single men stealthily to attach sticky paper with their telephone numbers to women’s backs in subway carriages.
Yet not everyone buys into the marriage market. Urban younger generations, especially those born after 1990, have embraced a freer style of dating. For them, an increasingly popular way to pick up a companion is a smart phone app called WeChat, with its geo-location functions that show who is nearby, sorted by sex and accompanied by profile pictures. No strings attached.
[264 words]
Q3: Why did Liu Lei organize such singles’ party and what was its goal?
Source: Economist
http://www.economist.com/blogs/analects/2013/11/millions-shop-spouseand-much-more
Article 4
Alibaba Deploys ZTE Broadband Technology for China Singles’ Day Online Shopping Traffic
By ZTE Corporation
ZTE’s ZXONE 8700 OTN system delivers ultra-large bandwidth approaching 300Gbits/s and fault-free reliability to help Alibaba handle massive surge in online shopping orders
[Time 5]
ZTE Corporation, a publicly-listed global provider of telecommunications equipment, network solutions and mobile devices, is pleased to provide mission-critical high-speed data transmission systems to help Alibaba Group handle a record-breaking surge in online shopping traffic on China Singles’ Day on 11 November, the busiest day of the year for Internet retailers in China.
ZXONE 8700, ZTE’s industry-leading series of 100 Gigabits per second (100G) optical transport network systems, carried 90% of Alibaba’s operating data traffic on China Singles’ Day, as a surge in online shopping orders pushed Alibaba’s peak data traffic to almost 300 Gbits per second, sustained for a period of 7 hours.
For the 24-hour duration of China Singles’ Day, ZTE’s OTN systems deployed by Alibaba delivered excellent network performance and fault-free reliability, with no malfunction warning reported. The unprecedented network traffic volume on Alibaba’s platforms on China Singles’ Day presented the sternest examination of the capabilities of ZXONE 8700. The ultra-high bandwidth, large-capacity and robust ZXONE 8700 proved equal to the challenge.
Alibaba Group expressed its gratitude to ZTE for the dedicated support and excellent performance of the optical transport network systems.
In anticipation of China Singles’ Day, ZTE created a special task force to support Alibaba, developing contingency plans and emergency solutions, and conducted meticulous testing of core systems and backup equipment. Network specialists and product development engineers at ZTE collaborated to develop a comprehensive set of solutions intended for various emergency scenarios, ensuring speedy system fault diagnosis and fast replacement of malfunctioning equipment to provide rapid service recovery. ZTE’s special Alibaba taskforce provided round-the-clock support in the run-up to China Singles’ Day at more than 10 Alibaba’s OTN Wide Area Networks (WAN) sites including Hangzhou and Qingdao. A fleet of emergency vehicles was on standby for rapid deployment at Alibaba’s Hangzhou headquarters.
[297 words]
Q4: Besides ZXONE 8700, what else special task did ZTE prepare for China Singles’ day?
Source: Yahoo Finance
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/alibaba-deploys-zte-broadband-technology-035500427.html;_ylt=AwrTWf2xaIRShBcAW_iTmYlQ
Article 5
Forget Cyber Monday. China's Singles Day Is Arbitrary Consumerism Done Right
By Kyle Stock
[Time 6]
For once, China’s demand for cashmere sweaters and other consumer goods has upstaged its need for coal and backhoes.
Chinese shoppers are expected to spend roughly $5 billion online by the end of Monday, spurred by a tide of sales synced with Singles Day, a semi-official celebration of not having a girlfriend, boyfriend, or life partner of some kind. To translate the sheer scope of the Chinese consumer holiday into American terms, this is expected to mark the second straight year that Singles Day sales roughly double the amount of e-commerce U.S. retailers collect on Cyber Monday.
This time around, however, Western retailers are paying attention. Gap, Microsoft, Steve Madden, and Adidas all organized sales campaigns around the holiday, held each year on Nov. 11. (Or 11/11, you see, for singles). Some Chinese bachelors and bachelorettes use the deals to woo other lonely hearts with gifts, but much of the shopping is entirely selfish.
It’s not uncommon for a savvy team of corporate marketers to quietly co-opt a holiday of sorts. The blitz of Corona ads every spring belie the fact that Cinco de Mayo is a relatively minor holiday in Mexico. And every President’s Day, U.S. carmakers act as if every commander in chief in the nation’s history had been born on a Detroit assembly line. Buy a Lincoln to, you know, honor Lincoln.
The muscular Singles Day strategy came from Alibaba Group, China’s equivalent of Amazon.com, and it has proven a savvy move. For one, would-be shoppers aren’t likely to be offended on sectarian grounds: Singles Day has no religious or even historic precedent. It was just cooked up in the early 1990s by some students who were frustrated by cultural pressure to couple up and settle down; the name translates literally as “bare sticks holiday.” In fact, Chinese consumers—already feeling a little rebellious—are possibly primed to buck against their own cautious budgeting. What’s more, the day is smack in the middle of a traditionally slow period for retail sales, between National Day on Oct. 1 and the Chinese New Year around February.
[347 words]
Q5: According to the passage, what makes the muscular Singles Day strategy successful?
[The Rest]
Cyber Monday, when bored office workers scour websites for holiday-shopping deals for no clear reason other than proximity to Black Friday, may pale in comparison with this celebration of singletons, but maybe Alibaba’s counterparts in the U.S. could learn from China and engineer a similarly arbitrary shopping tradition. The American calendar is rife with candidates. Groundhog Day (Feb. 2) could use a bit more of a raison d’être and is timed perfectly for busting tight post-holiday budgets. Wright Brothers Day (Dec. 17) seems like a natural fit for travel companies. Don’t forget Arbor Day in April, the best time of the year to plant a tree. And what about National Grandparents Day (Sept. 8)? Grandparents love shopping, right? Does it even matter?
[122 words]
Source: Bloomberg Businessweek
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-11-11/forget-cyber-monday-dot-chinas-singles-day-is-arbitrary-consumerism-done-right
Part III: Obstacle
Article 6
The Dark Side of China's $5.7 Billion Shopping Day
By William Pesek
[Paraphrase 7]
It's enough to make Amazon's Jeff Bezos gush with envy: young Chinese shoppers spent at least $5.7 billion in a single day on Monday.
China has roughly 591 million Internet users -- equal to the combined populations of the U.S., Brazil and Thailand. On Monday alone, more than 400 million unique visitors shopped on online shopping portal Alibaba. Perhaps the Obamacare folks can learn something about bandwidth capacity from China; a population the size of the Euro zone shopped without incident on a single company's website.
Of course, China boasts another 1 billion-plus people who have yet to become active online buyers. Needless to say, the growth potential of Chinese e-commerce is titanically large, unlike anything seen before in history. That's great news for Alibaba, the Amazon of China, and its ilk.
Yet at least one element of Monday's record-breaking shopping extravaganza should worry the Communist Party: the fast-rising number of single men who are now celebrating "11/11," the occasion for the online splurge. The "Singles' Day" holiday is a Chinese twist on Valentine's Day, an occasion for the lovelorn to console themselves with a bit of retail therapy. Chinese love numerology and, as we all know from Three Dog Night's pop classic, one is the loneliest number. The date 11/11 is made up of four of those lonely numbers. Some also refer to Nov. 11 as "Bare Branch Day," the day of being unwed.
This gets at an underappreciated crack in the veneer of Chinese stability: too few women.
China's demographic challenges are well known. It's become a cliché, for example, to say China will grow old before it gets rich. Less talked about is China's dangerous, and growing, gender imbalance. This testosterone glut is perhaps the most unintended side effect of the one-child policy. Economics explains China’s cultural preference for sons. When they get into their elderly years, parents can hope to live with their son. A daughter might enter into another family system upon marriage, leaving parents without a safety net.
Estimates for how many more men China will have reaching adulthood than women by 2020 range between 30 million and 40 million. Demographer Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute in Washington has taken an even longer-term look at the world's most competitive dating market. By 2030, Eberstadt predicts, more than 25 percent of Chinese men in their late 30s will never have married.
Not surprisingly, this "marriage squeeze," as Eberstadt calls it, will be most pervasive in the countryside, among the poorer and less-educated of China's 1.3 billion people. Trouble is, this is exactly the demographic that worries Communist Party leaders in Beijing when they mull the risks of social instability. This simmering problem will become acute on Xi Jinping's watch as he and Premier Li Keqiang pledge to tolerate lower gross domestic product growth in their effort to restructure the economy. How will Beijing cope with tens of millions of underprivileged, unmarried and, well, frustrated young men?
Demographer Valerie Hudson has explored this risk extensively, titling a 2004 book she wrote with Andrea M. den Boer "Bare Branches: The Security Implications of Asia's Surplus Male Population," and a more recent one “Sex and World Peace.” Hudson says that among the steps China should consider to avoid the kind of dystopian future mulled by science fiction writers is moving to a two-child policy.
Beijing will surely say butt out, this is a purely internal matter. Not so. Officials in Myanmar, Mongolia and Vietnam already are decrying the increasing flow of marriage-age women to China. Martin Walker of the New School University of New York, warns of "The Geopolitics of Sexual Frustration." Harvard’s Niall Ferguson questions whether too many bachelors could catalyze Arab Spring-like uprisings in Asia.
Environmentalists will clearly shudder at the idea of Chinese families suddenly having two or three kids. There's already grave concern about our planet's ability to sustain 7 billion humans, never mind 8 billion or 9 billion in short order. Fair enough. But there can be little doubt that Xi and Li must find ways to achieve better gender balance.
Building a more extensive safety net might make couples less linearly focused on having a son. That includes helping families bear the fast-rising costs of health care and education. Officials might also consider tax incentives to welcome daughters into the world. And who knows, a national program to educate parents on the importance of gender balance might even help.
Xi and Li had better start worrying about how frustrations over a system rigged in favor of party elites could fuse with the unmet sexual needs of tens of millions of very lonely men. Go ahead and revel in setting a one-day shopping record. Just be wary about the demographic trends that have made "Singles' Day" such a huge phenomenon.
[799 words]
Source: Bloomberg
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-12/the-dark-side-of-china-s-5-7-billion-shopping-day.html
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