Throwback Thursday: The Joy of Celebrating CNY in a World Without WeChat

Throwback Thursday takes a look back into Beijing's past, using our 12-year-strong blog archives as the source for a glance at the weird and wonderful stories of Beijing's days gone by.

By this time tomorrow, Beijing will be awash with firecrackers (outside the Fifth Ring Road at least), slivers of red paper, rivers of baijiu, and all the pomposity of a CCTV New Year's Gala as the city greets the Year of the Ox with wild abandon.

Yes, that's right folks, some things never change. Conversely, however, some things change so fast that our astonishment that they don't even exist anymore is simply too much for our feeble, mortal-brains to comprehend. Case in point: this article posted back on our lil' blog back in February 2008 detailing the vast number of text messages sent over the Chuxi season. Let's take a look:

"Aside from feasting, watching Zhang Ziyi's poor attempt at lip-syncing on TV and letting off truckloads of fireworks, Beijingers were also busy sending off text messages to friends and family on Spring Festival Eve. The official numbers haven't been announced yet, but China's Ministry of Information Industry (MII) was forecasting that across the country more than 17 billion Spring Festival greeting messages would be sent via mobile phone over the holiday season. In Beijing alone, 600 million text messages were sent on Chuxi (Spring Festival Eve), which works out at close to 38 texts per person. This number is up from 400 million last year."

Yep, text messages – remember those? Basically Twitter except you were conveying 140-character-long deep insights about the porridge you made for breakfast to only one person, with no pictures, awkwardly thumbing your clumsy plastic brick with its stiff buttons while wondering when technology was going to relieve you of such tedious communication, allowing you to share the true majesty of hot oats with a wider audience. Text messages, those minuscule nuggets of information that pained you to send, each one eating into your paycheck with every inane reply to a person you didn't even like. Text messages, creating a plane of disclosure existing long before your boss ever even considered texting you because of each of the aforementioned reasons ... oh, scrap that, maybe there were upsides ;^)

Yes, much like donkeys and carriages, warring states, bound feet, and coal-fired furnaces (ha!), text messages are now merely a figment of our imagination, lodged deep in the past i.e. what is: our memory. To put those days to shame we now have digital hongbaos, of which a staggering 14.2 billion were sent on Chuxi in 2017 alone, and in turn slowly eroding one of China's other great inventions: papermaking.

Yep, if there's one thing to be said for WeChat, it's that you can now make infinitely more money from messaging than you were ever going to while pissing pennies up the wall jabbing out antiquated texts. However, despite how much the past might have sucked, we know how this technology race malarkey ends; look back in another ten years and we'll be left in the dust, wishing that we could have just stuck with our old indestructible fiddly buttons. Lord knows that technology was never going to crack those.

Instead, now we must all hail Waggly Finger Wang.

READ: Throwback Thursday: As WeChat Turns 10, We Remember the Time It Became a Literal Work of Art

Images: baike.com, mfcad.com