Webster defines holiday as “a day on which one is exempted from work”. Academic rigour should only be to be taken with a grain of salt in a country where all rules are flexible, if you have the right strings to pull. 5.17, 5.20, 6.18, 11.11, 12.12… these are the dates of Chinese holidays that trace no historical root, but are a surefire way of exposing China’s contemporary culture, also known as shopping holidays.
韦伯斯特将假期定义为“免除工作的一天”。在一个所有规则都很灵活的国家，如果你有合适的条件的话，学术严谨性应该持保留态度。 5.17、5.20、6.18、11.11、12.12……这些中国节日的日期没有历史根源，但却是展示中国当代文化（也称为购物假期）的必经之路。
Surely, we cannot afford the population to go on a paid vacation more than once in five years; however, given the frustrated sales of Chinese products oversea, neither can we withstand losing our domestic market, our last fighting chance to retain the status as the world’s second largest economy.
当然，我们不能让人们在五年内享受一次以上的带薪假期；然而，由于中国产品海外销售受挫，我们也无法失去国内市场，这是我们保住世界第二大经济体地位的最后机会。
In other words, we cannot allow the Chinese people to apply consciousness when it comes to shopping that retrenches their expenditures. Rather, we should promote shopping holidays even when they work so much overtime that they barely have a minute for dinner.
换句话说，我们不能让中国人在购物时有意识地节约开支。相反，我们应该提倡购物假期，即使他们加班太多，几乎没有时间吃饭。
E-commerce hence enters the Jumbotron. Thanks to shopping Apps such as Taobao or JD, shoppers can easily spend a few thousand of RMB without leaving their desks. While the business mode of brick-and-mortar epitomises the transition phase of many wester economies, the Chinese E-commerce has flourished for many years due to a hodgepodge of social and technological contingencies.
电子商务因此进入了大屏幕。借助淘宝、京东等购物应用，购物者足不出户就能轻松花掉几千元。虽然实体商业模式是许多西方经济体转型阶段的缩影，但中国电子商务却由于社会和技术突发事件的大杂烩而蓬勃发展了多年。
Besides convenience, price, for example, is another strong competitive factor. While the Chinese have witnessed an extraordinary leap in commodity price and living cost, the growth of personal income is hardly palpable. Online data released by zhaopin.com, a leading recruitment website, shows that the average salary per month among 32 major cities in China stands at ¥6,070， whereas a family dinner at a nondescript restaurant can top $2,000 at ease. Such an imbalanced ratio between spending and earning drives a throng of Chinese shoppers online, where counterfeits and knockoffs of even better qualities are sold at a much more affordable price.
除了便利性之外，价格也是另一个强有力的竞争因素。尽管中国人的物价和生活成本大幅上涨，但个人收入的增长却难以察觉。领先的招聘网站智联招聘发布的在线数据显示，中国32个主要城市的平均月薪为6070元，而家庭聚餐在一家不起眼的餐厅轻松就能突破2000美元。支出与收入之间的这种不平衡比例驱使大量中国消费者在网上购物，质量更好的假冒伪劣产品以更实惠的价格出售。
With the stronghold of such a premise, all we need now is a momentum; an excuse and a reminder to spend our problems away on these shopping holidays. And that is where we spew out holidays such as 6.18, whose pronunciation in Chinese symbolises lucky fortune.
有了这样一个前提的支撑，我们现在所需要的只是一个动力；一个借口和一个提醒，让我们在这些购物假期中消除我们的问题。这就是我们提出“6.18”这样的节日的原因，“6.18”的中文发音象征着幸运。
While the Americans celebrate Thanksgiving for massive sales, we invent our turkey day and many of its equivalents to have Black Friday(s), on which shoppers compensate the deprivation of their non-material needs with questionable designer bags, skincare products, and food supplements from Switzerland that are said to work miracles with their ravaged systems.
当美国人庆祝感恩节的大规模销售时，我们发明了火鸡日和许多类似的黑色星期五，购物者在这一天用来自瑞士的有问题的名牌包、护肤品和食品补充剂来弥补他们非物质需求的匮乏，据说这些产品对他们饱受摧残的身体系统产生了奇迹。
But since when did a country that used to be so rich in culture decline to such degree? Who or what gives us the right to create another Valentine’s Day just because that the numbers of 520 together sound like “I love you”? Culture against the context of nationalism is viewed to be congruent with polity, and the culture that nationalism claims to defend is as often as not its own invention, or is, as Cambridge professor, Ernest Gellner argues, “modified out of all recognition”.
但一个曾经文化如此丰富的国家，从什么时候开始衰落到如此地步了呢？谁或什么赋予我们权利创造另一个情人节，仅仅因为 520 的数字听起来像“我爱你”？反对民族主义背景的文化被认为与政治是一致的，而民族主义声称捍卫的文化往往不是它自己的发明，或者正如剑桥大学教授欧内斯特·盖尔纳所说，“被修改得面目全非”。
The Chinese culture we experience today, and whose roof is provided by the new Chinese nationalism, therefore, is an abnormal reproduction that creates a situation where educes the need of many.
因此，我们今天所经历的中国文化，其屋顶是由新中国民族主义提供的，是一种不正常的复制，造成了一种减少许多人需要的情况。
