Data from China’s Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) showed Wednesday that Chinese citizens spent a record 926 billion yuan in shops and restaurants during the Spring Festival holiday－which just ended－up 10.2 percent from last year. Quality consumption became a highlight of this year’s holiday spending.

With an expanding middle class, China's wealthier consumers are becoming less price sensitive, and putting more emphasis on product quality when purchasing. The sales of healthy food, such as organic grains, green vegetables, seasonal fruits, as well as health care products, boomed during the holiday.

Imported fresh foods like crab from Chile, lobster from Boston and fish from New Zealand became the new highlights on China’s holiday dining tables. China’s largest e-commerce platform Alibaba reported a 300-percent increase of trading volume of imported fresh foods during the Spring Festival holiday.

Smart home appliances including smart TVs, washing machines with dryers, sweeping robots and dish washers are among the most popular products for Spring Festival shoppers. Alibaba’s data shows the sales of cooking robots, window cleaning robots and steam mops increased by 145, 169 and 320 percent respectively during the holiday season, indicating that more and more Chinese people are looking to free themselves or their parents from housework like cooking and cleaning so as to better enjoy their family reunions.  

Besides, newly released smart phones, wearable devices and other digital gadgets continue to be a hit on Spring Festival market.

While Spring Festival consumption has been growing steadily all over China, second- and third-tier cities in central and western China are beating eastern coastal cities in terms of growth. It is specially worth noting that rural residents are racing ahead of urban dwellers in buying fresh food online.

Alibaba’s data shows that northwest China’s Qinghai Province bought more than eight times the fruits and vegetables over the previous year’s holiday. Inner Mongolia, rich in cattle and sheep, spent more than five times as much on aquatic products than 2017. Cherries from Chile, mango from Vietnam, and durian from Thailand became the most popular festive fruits among rural consumers. The number of Chilean cherry orders surged over four times compared with that in 2017.

Fresh foods are not the only things that filled the online shopping trolleys of rural residents. Alibaba’s data shows that consumers in central China’s Henan Province bought the widest range of smart products online, from speaker boxes, drones, and intelligent toilets to robot noodle makers. Also, people in southwest China’s Yunnan Province bought the most drones online during the holiday – not for spraying insecticide, but for taking pictures.