Flood of New Year's greetings drowns out cheerful spirit

BEIJING - Sending friendly text messages on the eve of Chinese New Year may sound like a convenient way to spread good cheer, but for those busily deleting hundreds of messages flooding their mobiles from friends, family and even strangers, it can feel like more of a burden.

According to China's major mobile phone operators, about 1 billion text messages were sent in Beijing alone on Wednesday - the Spring Festival Eve.

China Mobile, one of the leading mobile phone operators in China, said its Beijing users sent 770 million text messages that night, up about 13 percent year-on-year.

China Unicom mobile users in Beijing sent more than 143 million messages during the day, and at around 7 pm on Spring Festival Eve the company was handling about 4,700 text messages per second.

Shanghai users of China Mobile sent 920 million text messages on the same day, up 20 percent, while in Guangdong province, the number of messages sent on Wednesday night increased by more than 23 percent year-on-year.

"God knows how many text messages I received on Spring Festival Eve, it must have been over a hundred. I even received many from people I don't even know," said Yin Ni, who runs an online store in Beijing.

"I never send such messages because I don't consider pressing the button saying 'send message to all contacts' is sincere. People should realize that the only beneficiaries are the mobile phone operators."

"I can't stand the frequent text message noises and so I just silenced my mobile phone," said Wang Shuhua, a primary school teacher in Linfen of North China's Shanxi province.

"There are so many! I've received up to 300 text messages for Spring Festival in recent years. I felt touched at first, then just burdened to even have to read them," Wang said.

Examples of many generic greetings are even available online for people to copy, said Liang Zhisheng, head of a police station on Heping North Road in Taiyuan, capital of Shanxi.

"No matter how witty they are, they can't touch our hearts like those simple or plain words in your friends' own writing," Liang said.

This year is the Year of the Rabbit. In Mandarin, the word "rabbit" is pronounced the same as the word "to" in English, so "Happy to you" has become one of the most popular greetings this year.

Xinhua contributed to this story.

China Daily

(China Daily 02/07/2011 page2)