‘Every year, people come and go, but everything else stays the same’ — Phrase of the Week
Livestream sellers come and go in China's cutthroat livestream ecommerce business, but everything else stays the same.
Our phrase of the week is: Every year, people come and go, but everything else stays the same (年年岁岁花相似，岁岁年年人不同 niánnián suìsuì huā xiāngsì, suìsuì niánnián rén bùtóng).
Context
The Singles Day shopping festival is the largest single shopping event in China and around the world. Also known as Double Eleven (双十一 shuāng shíyī), the online shopping festival originally took place on November 11, and is called Singles Day because of the ones in the date. In recent years, Singles Day promotions have started at the beginning of November and ended on the 11th day of the month.
China’s two biggest ecommerce platforms, Alibaba and JD.com, decided not to publish sales data for the first time this year: Sales are either too bad, which would upset shareholders, or too good, which may draw the wrong kind of attention from regulators, which have, for the last few years, been cracking down on the highly profitable internet platforms.
Singles Day sales channels have also been changing: Short-form video-sharing social platforms Kuaishou and Douyin have cultivated celebrities who sell products through livestream ecommerce, or 直播带货 zhíbò dàihuò, which has become a big part of the Double Eleven festival in recent years.
This cutthroat sector has seen many changes this year, with stricter regulations introduced in August, and a number of incumbent livestream sellers falling foul of regulators.
Some of the “first generation” (一代 yīdài) livestream celebrities who have fallen out of Beijing’s good graces have quickly been replaced with new, yet relatively obscure names.
Enter Zhāng Qìngyáng 张庆杨, who posts as “Crazy Little Brother Yang” (疯狂小杨哥 fēngkuáng xiǎo yáng gē) on Douyin: He is a 27-year-old from the eastern Chinese province of Anhui who began posting video content on the platform just four years ago.
Zhang was the first person to exceed 100 million followers, becoming the most-followed person on Douyin. He also bought an office block in the city of Hefei for over 100 million yuan ($14.1 million).
An article in tech blog 36kr discusses whether Zhang will truly break into the top tier of China’s top livestream ecommerce sellers, or whether he, like many before him, might just be another name that comes and goes:
During the annual Double Eleven festival, the popularity of livestreaming has not diminished. As the saying goes, “Every year, the flowers are the same, but every year, the people are different.” Many popular livestream celebrities have disappeared, but at the same time, many new names have appeared. “Crazy Little Brother Yang” is representative of this, but can he defeat the “big four” livestream ecommerce sellers?
一年一度双11，直播带货热度不减。正所谓，“年年岁岁花相似，岁岁年年人不同”，很多大红大紫的带货主播消失了，但同时也有很多新势力登堂入室，那么，这其中最具代表性的 “疯狂小杨哥”，能将“二代带货四天王”拉下马？
Yìnián yídù shuāng 11, zhíbō dàihuò rèdù bù jiǎn. Zhèngsuǒwèi,“nián nián suì suì huā xiāngsì, suì suì nián nián rén bùtóng,” hěnduō dàhóngdàzǐ de dàihuò zhǔbō xiāoshīle, dàn tóngshí yěyǒu hěnduō xīn shìlì dēngtángrùshì, nàme, zhè qízhōng zuì jù dàibiǎo xìng de “fēngkuáng xiǎo yáng gē,” néng jiāng “èr dài dàihuò sìtiānwáng” lā xiàmǎ?
Translation
“Every year, the flowers are the same, but every year, the people are different” is a line from the poem “Sorrow for the White-Haired Old Man” (代悲白头翁 dài bēi báitóuwēng), the famous work written by the Tang dynasty (651–680) poet Liú Xīyí 刘希夷.
It is also the best-known line from the poem, which most Chinese people are familiar with.
Liu is expressing his sadness at seeing how people age, and eventually die, with each passing year, while the surroundings, the flowers, remain constant.
In modern Chinese, this line of poetry is a metaphor for the contrast of constant change against certain things that remain the same.
For “Crazy Little Brother Yang,” the churn and chaos of China’s livestream ecommerce business means ongoing change: New names disappear as quickly as they rise from obscurity to stardom.
In English, you might say, “Every year, people come and go, but everything else stays the same.”
So, will China’s latest livestream ecommerce sensation be around next year, or is he just another name destined to fade away?
