Making a holiday splash
Singers and dancers perform at the Mid-Autumn Festival Concert in the Greater Bay Area in Shenzhen, Guangdong province, on Tuesday. More than 100 renowned filmmakers and musicians from the Chinese mainland, Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan gathered at the concert to celebrate the festival.
More than 100 renowned filmmakers and musicians from the Chinese mainland, Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan gathered on Tuesday in Shenzhen, Guangdong province, to celebrate the holiday with a touch of nostalgia at the MidAutumn Festival concert in the Greater Bay Area.
At the gala, Faye Wong sang the theme song, Bay, which borrowed from the lyrics of the traditional Guangdong nursery rhyme “Moonlight Light”, and the dazzling performance brought the show to a climax.
With the bright moon of Mid-Autumn Festival shining on the Shenzhen Bay Sports Center, nicknamed the Spring Cocoon for its shape, popular melodies triggered the audience’s nostalgia.
The concert, which added to the joy and warmth of the traditional
Chinese festival, was also a cheerful celebration of the economic prosperity created by the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area Online Shopping Festival and a cultural exchange sparked by the gala.
With a theme of family reunion and the use of classic film music throughout the performance, the concert featured a grand star lineup, a host of songs from classic Hong Kong films that continue to resonate, a remarkable duration at 150 minutes, and was broadcast, livestreamed and covered by mainstream media across the mainland and the Hong Kong and Macao special administrative regions, said Dong Ruifeng, director of the editorin-chief’s office at the CCTV Film Channel.
Over 100 livestream channels on Taobao, promoted by popular Chinese e-commerce influencers and celebrities from the mainland, Hong Kong and Macao, were set up to promote over 2,000 products of
Greater Bay Area brands. Among the influencers were Viya and Austin Li, who are household names and online-shopping trendsetters on the mainland. Viewers could also scramble for digital red packets worth a total of 10 million yuan ($1.55 million) while binge-watching the star-studded gala.
The concert was simulcast on the CCTV-6 movie channel, as well as several leading television stations in the Greater Bay Area, and broadcast live on new media platforms including People’s Daily and Xinhua News Agency.
The three-week-long Greater Bay Area online shopping festival, which started on Sept 2, was wrapped up amid the climax of the gala. The festival featured 800,000 merchants from the region, nearly 300,000 brands and 13 million products on e-commerce platforms.
The shopping festival helped revive the retail markets in Guangdong, Hong Kong and Macao, sending consumers from across the country on a shopping spree. Data show that between Sept 2 and 21, transactions totaled over 100 billion yuan.
The festival was welcomed by Hong Kong retailers, as it opened a bigger market and platform, thereby raising the profile of Hong Kong’s homegrown brands.
Ma Pak Leung, a nearly 200-yearold traditional Chinese medicine brand, recorded a 14 percent increase in aggregate turnover.
“The integration of development in the Bay Area and the burgeoning of wellness medicine on the Chinese mainland will create tremendous room for improvement for local brands, including us,” said Chu Ka-yuk, Ma Pak Leung’s marketing and sales manager.
The festival will also allow more people to get to know the brand’s legacy, pedigree and culture, he added.