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Christmas in China:

Christmas's Commercial Side
Makes Yuletide a Hit in China

By DAVID MURPHY
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

BEIJING -- Lu Wei is a businessman. He sells Christmas. Sitting at his market stall in downtown Beijing, where he stocks framed pictures of Jesus and Mary with electric cords dangling from them, he says business is good.

Then the wiry young vendor makes a confession. "I have no idea who they are," he says while plugging in Jesus and Mary. Their pictures start to spin psychedelically in their frames. "Do you know who they are? They're $25 each."

This is Christmas in China, 2002. Santa Claus's cheery red face is plastered in shop windows in major cities, tinny tracks of "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" play in an endless loop inside high-end restaurants, and there have been some department-store sightings of Chinese-looking Santas. Christmas fever is gripping China's newly rising urban middle class as an excuse to shop, eat and party.

If Americans complain that the holiday has been commercialized beyond recognition, then many Chinese don't know it was ever anything else. Christmas appeals in large part because it is seen as international and modern, not because it's a traditional Christian celebration. The now hip holiday is just another benchmark of progress in this fast-developing country. Along with China's membership in the World Trade Organization or its selection to host the 2008 Olympic Games, Christmas signals the nation's new role in the world. And all the ordinary Chinese citizen needs to take part in Christmas is a little spare cash to spend.

Bars in Beijing's fashionable Sanlitun district -- where there is normally free admission -- charge up to $25 entrance on Christmas Eve. Foreign businesses also get a slice of the cake. In Shanghai, Mark De Cocinis, who manages the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, says all four hotel restaurants are fully booked tonight and 350 more people -- almost all of them locals -- will pay $180 each to attend a Christmas Eve function at the hotel ballroom. "It's my fifth Christmas in Shanghai and each year it gets busier," he says.

Like another recently adopted foreign celebration, Valentine's Day, Christmas gets its warmest embrace from young people curious about what's cool. "We're learning about this from you foreigners," says Chen Ling from rural Anhui province, who works as a waitress in a Beijing bar, "but we don't copy everything. Chinese New Year is a family time. Christmas is for fun." That means eating out with friends or work colleagues, drinks and karaoke. Incessant cellphone messaging of Christmas greetings are part of the festivities.

Curiously, the business of Christmas may be a key to the holiday's political survival in China. Just a few years ago, the official media was attacking Christmas as foreign and un-Chinese. But in its current commercial guise, Christmas poses no threat to the Communist Party's rule. Indeed, a shop-till-you drop spirit appears to be a welcome new wrinkle in a country where the government creates national holidays in an effort to boost consumer spending.

Thus, while China's authorities continue to launch police campaigns against religious groups that are not officially approved and keep a close eye on those that are, Santa is no longer on their black list. "Religion? No, that's got nothing to do with Christmas. It's about having a good time with your friends," says Wang Xiaolin, a 40-year-old employee of a state-owned company, while standing in a Beijing department store as her friend waited in line to buy a battery-powered Santa Claus.

The country's embrace of Christmas internally compliments what it is selling overseas: China has become an export powerhouse of plastic trees, tinsel, twinkling lights and other yuletide trinkets. In the first 11 months of this year, China's exports of Christmas products topped $1 billion. It also exported $7.5 billion worth of toys last year, so there's a fair chance that something on -- or under -- many Americans' trees this season was made in the heaving factories of coastal China that are the largest suppliers of Christmas paraphernalia to the U.S. market.

Write to David Murphy at david.murphy@wsj.com2