The “Lucky Money” That Started It All—The Reinvention of the Ancient Tradition “Red Packet” in Digital Times

Abstract

In August 2020, President Trump attempted to ban WeChat, indicating the growing impact of the most widely used social medium in China. WeChat enjoys a monthly active user base of 1.2 billion, but the Internet giant’s story started with a humble function, “Red Packet.” The function of Red Packet paved the way for WeChat to intelligently integrate into the Chinese financial sphere. This study examines the cultural, economic, and relational implications of the digital reinvention of traditional red packet gifts, and monetary giving that represents good luck and well wishes in festive situations. Drawing upon Mauss’ conceptualization of gift economy within the context of contemporary China and the art of social relationships, “ guanxi,” the author closely examines Tencent’s annual report and conducts semi-structured interviews to study WeChat Red Packet (hereafter WCRP) gifting. This article concludes that (1) the obligatory feeling of guanxi management renders WCRP giving, receiving, and reciprocity compulsory practices; (2) WCRP facilitates “immediate reciprocity,” in which, instrumental guanxi may be produced and dissolved instantaneously; (3) the phenomena of social comparison and social hierarchy are mirrored in virtual groups; (4) with platformed sociality and monetizing connectivity, WCRP paved the way for alternative economic practices within Chinese authoritarian capitalism; and (5) WCRP contains characteristics of a personalized gift and materialist commodity.

From affordances to cultural affordances: An analytic framework for tracing the dynamic interaction among technology, people and culture

“…Holmes et al's study can be further developed by applying our proposed framework of cultural affordances. Indeed, WeChat's digital red packets enable users to practise the cultural tradition of giving red packets more easily in the absence of spatiotemporal constraints (Xu, 2021). The digital feature reveals a cultural aspect of the design and is a cultural affordance of WeChat.…”

“…Additionally, Chinese cultural practices and values would affect users' practices on WeChat. For example, in some WeChat groups, only supervisors, rather than the team members, give out digital red packets to boost the team's morale; people of equal positions normally give each other similar amounts of money when exchanging digital red packets (Xu, 2021). Therefore, people still follow certain hierarchical orders when using the digital red packets.…”

“…On the one hand, users quickly adopted the new technology and became more comfortable using digital red packets to manage various relationships in their own social networks (Xu, 2021). On the other hand, users still had to follow certain hierarchical orders when giving or receiving digital red packets.…”

“…The feature attracted more than 8 million users, and the payments made totalled approximately 400 million yuan (85 million US dollars) via 40 million messages within nine days (Holmes et al, 2015). Consequently, millions of new users signed up for WeChat and voluntarily subscribed to the WeChat payment system by linking it with their bank accounts (Yin, 2015; Xu, 2021).…”

“…Additionally, the digital red packets come in two types. One can either send a digital red packet to another individual or designate an amount of money to give to a group of people (Liu et al, 2015; Xu, 2021). The former bears a resemblance to the traditional practice, but the latter is a gamified version of red packets.…”