In recent decades, a new pattern has emerged in the luxury retail world: In late December, many of the world's most valuable brands will unveil exclusive lines of merchandise covered in Chinese cultural symbols, one of a dozen animal zodiac signs, the color red or all of the above.To get more chinese culture news, you can visit shine news official website.

Marketing for this Lunar New Year, which falls on Friday, is no different. Nike, for instance, remixed its high-top sneakers with graphics of popping firecrackers and artisanal Chinese knots. Apple offered limited-edition AirPods Pros with ox emojis stamped on the cases. The Swiss boutique Vacheron Constantin, meanwhile, dropped $130,000 watches with high-relief engravings of the animal.Compared to those from past holiday seasons, the Year of the Ox capsule collections haven't drawn as much mockery or as many boycotts from Asian consumers.

But the commercialization of Lunar New Year still raises long-standing questions within the Asian diaspora about the co-opting and whitewashing of ethnic traditions — and whether mainstream recognition can bring about meaningful social change. The commodification of Lunar New Year — also known as Chinese New Year or Spring Festival — by Western brands began in the early 1990s, when China grew into an economic powerhouse with an emergent middle class who saw opulence as a status symbol, said Min Zhou, director of the Asia Pacific Center at UCLA."It's part of broader trends of consumerism, commercialization and globalization" unfolding at the time that weren't "unique to the Chinese or Chinese New Year," she said, noting the transformation of other major cultural holidays, like Christmas and Thanksgiving, into shopping bonanzas. Today, China is the most important market for high-end Western retailers. In 2018, Chinese shoppers bought one-third of the world's luxury goods, and the country is on track to become the world's largest apparel market by the end of the decade. The spending swells over Lunar New Year: Consumers spent $149 billion during the weeklong break in 2019, according to the Chinese Commerce Ministry. Across the U.S. and the U.K., releases of Lunar New Year luxury products rose by 75 percent from 2019 to 2020, according to the retail market intelligence platform Edited.

The aggressive courting of Chinese shoppers by U.S. retailers can distort how non-Asians see Asian Americans by reinforcing the model minority myth, said Chiou-Ling Yeh, author of "Making an American Festival: Chinese New Year in San Francisco's Chinatown." The marketing and ads blitz by luxury brands often "conflates Chinese buyers with Chinese Americans and Asian Americans," she said, adding that it also bolsters the stereotype that all Asians are successful, wealthy and materialistic. Yeh said the purchasing power of the Chinese middle class doesn't accurately reflect the financial status of Asians overseas. And the China-centric aesthetics of Lunar New Year collections — zodiac animals as a chief design motif, Chinese celebrities as leads in ads — overlook the many other ethnic groups that celebrate the holiday both in Asia and in the U.S., including Singaporeans, Vietnamese and Koreans. The misconceptions, she said, can be particularly harmful when anti-Asian hate crimes are soaring and Asian Americans are experiencing some of the biggest job losses among all racial groups.