Red Packets in the Real and Virtual Worlds  
How Multi-Function WeChat Influences  
Chinese Vir tual Relationships
Xiaojing Ji
The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, a classical 
book by French sociologist Marcel Mauss (1966), details how the early exchange 
systems center around the obligations to give, to receive and to reciprocate. 
There is a series of rights and duties about consuming and repaying existing 
side by side with rights and duties about giving and receiving. The pattern of 
symmetrical and reciprocal rights is not difficult to understand if we realize that 
it is first and foremost a pattern of spiritual bonds between things which are 
to some extent parts of persons, and persons and groups that behave in some 
measure as if they were things (Mauss 1966: 11). This essay states primarily 
that the most popular mobile social application in China, WeChat, has changed 
Chinese social relationships—between family, friends, colleagues, strangers—
via the “Red Packet” app function. With the goal of exposing how WeChat Red 
Packets impact and influence people’s lives, I have collected examples both from 
groups and individuals, together with stories from my family and friends, and 
additionally from some WeChat group members previously unknown to me. 
Further, I interviewed some Western friends of mine who live and work in 
Berlin, who use WeChat to communicate with Chinese people. I asked them 
about their reaction to WeChat Red Packets, as  they are quite familiar with 
WeChat. However, because WeChat requires a Chinese bank account to use 
this function, they had never actually used Red Packets themselves. 
These examples and stories illustrate why and how Red Packets could deeply 
influence Chinese social relationships and how they could indeed take the 
lead in developing new personal relationships. All the interviewees were very 
open to sharing their own stories, however, some of them were not interested 
in sharing the financial aspects of their Red Packet usage. This data does not 
reflect all segments of Chinese society. Exclusions of note are residents of 
western China and Chinese people over sixty-five years. 
68 Xiaojing Ji
what is weChat? 
WeChat began as a project at the Tencent Guangzhou Research and Project 
Center in October 2010. The original version of the app, Weixin, was invented 
by Xiaolong Zhang, and named by  Ma Huateng, CEO of Tencent. In April 
2012, Weixin was re-branded as WeChat for the international market. On 12 
August 2015, Tencent revealed WeChat’s Monthly Active Users (MAU) metric1 
to be 600 million, a rapid increase over the previously released figure of 549 
million MAUs released only five months previously.2 WeChat is a social appli- 
cation that combines a communication function similar to WhatsApp or 
Messenger, a digital payment function—which connects to the customer’s 
private bank account (similar to Paypal or Alipay)—and also information 
posting via Moments (like Facebook). With this multi-functional application, 
each smartphone owner uses one or two accounts (one for work and a second 
one for his or her personal life).
According to the GSMA Intelligence 2016 research report3 there are 1.3 
billion people in China who have mobile device connections, 62 percent of whom 
were using a smartphone by the end of 2015, exceeding the Europe average of 55 
percent. Concurrent to the rapid increase in mobile device usage, WeChat has 
become the number one social application in China with 600 million active 
users, which represents 93 percent of the Chinese social app market. WeChat 
is not only a social messaging app, with multiple functions such as Moment, 
Contact Card, Share Location, Real Time Location, Wallet, Red Packet and 
Transfer; WeChat also has a WhatsApp-like messaging function, which has a 
practical use in daily life.
1 | Monthly Active Users is one of the ways to measure the success rate of online social 
games and social networking services. The metric is defined by counting the number of 
unique users during a specific measurement period.
2 | Steven, Millward. “WeChat now has 500 million monthly active users” Accessed April 
30, 2016. https://www.techinasia.com/wechat-500-million-active-users-q4-2014
3 | Data sources from: GSMA Intelligence. https://www.gsmaintelligence.com/
markets/623/dashboard/
Red Packets in the Real and Vir tual Worlds 69
what are “reD PaCke ts”?
In China, a Red Packet is a monetary gift, given during holidays or special 
occasions such as weddings, graduation or the birth of a baby.4 Red Packets are 
given by older people to younger ones, by married people to unmarried ones, 
or by employed people to unemployed ones. During the Chinese New Year, the 
older generation traditionally put money in a red envelope and give it to the 
younger generation with best wishes for the coming new year; they also prepare 
Red Packets with small amount of cash for neighborhood kids. In the streets, all 
the flowerpots are decorated with lots of red packets.
Image 1 
A red packet given to my nephews this year, bearing the word  
of my family name: JI
When I was little, the most exciting thing about New Year was waiting for 
midnight on New Year’s Eve when my parents took out Red Packets to give to 
me—inside was brand new money. However, before they gave them to me, I had 
to say “gong xi fa cai, hong bao na lai”, which means: “I wish you a good fortune, 
4 | “Red packet: Sign of prosperity” Accessed: May 1, 2016. http://www.char4u.com/
content/red-packet-sign-of-prosperity/
70 Xiaojing Ji
give me a red packet!” Since going to work, after graduation from university, I 
no longer receive red packets from my family or relatives. Instead, I now have to 
prepare them for my twin nephews who are the sons of my elder sister.
I still remember the night before my elder sister’s wedding, when my 
mother and I prepared a small amount of red packets for her big day. My mother 
was actually very sad about the fact that, in traditional Chinese culture, when 
a daughter gets married this means that she will go to her husband’s home; 
henceforth she will belong to her husband’s home. My mother was not looking 
forward to the day that her daughter would go to her husband’s home because 
she feared that this change might mean her daughter would have a less caring 
relationship with her mother than before. The next day, my new brother-in-law 
came to my house to pick up my sister. He and his best man first needed to 
complete all of the bridesmaids’ tasks while remaining outside the front door. 
According to Chinese tradition, the bridesmaids are responsible for protecting 
the door until all tasks are completed. The tasks could include, for instance, 
performing fifty push-ups or singing a technically challenging love song to 
the bride. In practice, most of these tasks remain uncompleted. To compensate 
for such uncompleted tasks, they must send Red Packets through the door to 
the bridesmaids, then after at least 30 minutes, the bridesmaids may finally 
grant them entry in order to take the bride away. Another traditional Chinese 
ritual involves the newly married couple serving tea together with green tea 
leaves, red dates and lotus. After serving tea for the third time, the couple must 
formally address each other’s new in-laws as “father” and “mother” for the first 
time. Following this, the new couple receives a large number of red packets 
from the older generation. Nowadays, in the virtual social world, things have 
changed. Virtual consumption leads to a change in people’s values, and this 
affects their patterns of consumer behavior. WeChat launched Digital Wallet 
in 2013. Since then, people have used the WeChat Wallet payment system for 
consumer activity in daily life—for instance, shopping in convenience stores, 
restaurants and even buying street food. In early 2014 just before Chinese New 
Year, WeChat launched a new product; it became possible to digitally “send” 
Red Packets. Each Red Packet can be ‘filled’ with any amount from 200 RMB5; 
there is no upper limit on the amount that can be sent but there is a single bank 
account limit of 50.000 RMB each day. People send Red Packets via WeChat 
without rituals or red-envelope objects and without meeting face-to-face; they 
only need to click on their smartphone for 5 seconds, after which everything is 
taken care of.
5 | RMB Chinese Yuan Renminbi—the official currency of the People’s Republic of China.
Red Packets in the Real and Vir tual Worlds 71
Image 2 
Red Packet WeChat screenshot.
In 2015, WeChat cooperated with other major Chinese companies to launch 
“Yao Yi Yao.6” Five hundred million RMB were sent in Red Packets whilst 
playing the game during Chinese New Year 2015.
According to WeChat official data, people sent 51,94 billion Red Packets 
(equivalent to 37 Red Packets per person) via WeChat over six days during 
Chinese New Year 2016. This was a 16-fold increase in comparison to the same 
six days of the last Chinese New Year, which saw 3,27 billion Red Packets sent 
via WeChat. However, WeChat did not publish the total amount of money of the 
Red Packets sent during 2016 Chinese New Year.
Divided by generation, the predominant user group are people born in the 
1980s who sent 10,2 billion Red Packets; people who were born during the 
1960s-1980s sent more than 0,8 billion Red Packets; people who were born 
before the 1960s only sent in total 0,4 billion.
6 | “Yao Yi Yao” is a commercial enter tainment game during the Chinese New Year eve 
gala, which involves shaking a random amount of Red Packets. When the event hosts 
announced “action”, people who have WeChat accounts keep shaking their cellphones 
for about 30 seconds, could get a random amount of Red Packets.
72 Xiaojing Ji
how Do Wechat Red packets imPaCt on re al  
anD virtual rel ationshiPs?
Prior to the emergence of WeChat Red Packets, the giving of Red Packets was 
normally confined to happy occasions. Today, Red Packets are also used in 
other situations. For example: HuiJuan is a graduate student at the Humboldt 
University in Berlin who, while researching her thesis, needed to find some 
Chinese academic information. She posted on WeChat Moment asking for help 
from her friends living in China who could offer her a user account in order to 
access the Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure website—she added the 
comment: “despite lots of love, will offer a Red Packet in return for your help.” 
Examples such as that of HuiJuan, illustrated to me how Red Packets are now 
being sent between friends who provide help. Last year in May, I injured my 
ankle in an accident. The consequence of the injury meant I could not walk 
anywhere so I stayed at home for nearly two months. After posting about this 
incident in a WeChat Moment, I received kind greeting messages from more 
than one hundred friends—some of them came to see me, bringing me gifts 
such as packages of fruit or flowers. Amongst those who could not come in 
person, some instead sent me Red Packets via WeChat. With the fast-growing 
urbanization of China, people often move away from their hometown to big 
cities; families no longer live close, or they are too busy with their work and 
personal life. More and more, people are choosing to send red packets with 
greeting messages via WeChat instead of spending the time to go shopping 
for gifts and visiting in person, because it takes too much time and also might 
interrupt the recipient’s daily schedule. In a company WeChat group, however, 
things could be just the opposite; to give an example, a senior manager or a 
team leader sends a Red Packet to the group. Group members who are at a lower 
level in the company are usually quite cautious and hence they hesitate to open 
the packet at all.
In my former colleague’s WeChat group, I once saw a Red Packet sent by a 
general manager. Curiosity drove me to click and see whether or not the other 
group members had opened the Red Packet. For those group members who had 
opened them, I was able to see the details of the sent status, while I was forced 
to keep waiting to see whether the remaining group members would open their 
Red Packets or not. I simply could not understand the psychology of those users 
who had not yet opened their gifts. Later, one co-worker told me that she always 
opens her Red Packets the minute she sees them, while other colleagues joked 
with her, asking “Why is your internet connection always so much faster than 
ours?” In the end, in order to save face, she ended up having to send a larger 
amount of Red Packet money back to the group than she had received from the 
group in the first place. In the case of another colleague who rushed to open her 
Red Packets, her colleagues asked her to buy lunch for everyone in the office and 
Red Packets in the Real and Vir tual Worlds 73
no one turned her offer down. In order to avoid this political office game, less 
and less people tend to scrape for Red Packets, resulting in the Red Packets being 
returned to the sender unopened after twenty-four hours. However, younger 
colleagues are still very addicted to this game mode, so they continue to scrape 
for Red Packets.
How Do Red Packets  Become Addictive?
Red Packets become addictive, particularly in WeChat groups, which are limited 
to a maximum of five hundred members. WeChat groups are set up by one 
person who invites his or her WeChat friends to join his group. Group members 
normally do not know each other, as they usually only know the person who 
invited them to join the group. The group typically has a specific subtitle—
for example, among my WeChat groups there are traditional cultural, travel, 
classical-music and virtual-reality sub-groups. Members either talk about the 
topic and events in the subtitle or they post advertisements and relevant links. 
Often I have received about 1000 messages from just one group, forcing me 
to mute such notifications. Once you send a Red Packet for a random amount, 
people in the group will scramble for it, as otherwise they will be too late 
and go empty-handed, receiving the notification, “better luck next time.” In 
addition, when the amount is set to “random,” the person who opens the packet 
containing the largest amount will be marked as having received the “luckiest 
draw.” The game model of the group WeChat Red Packet stimulates people’s 
enthusiasm and initiative, at the same time exposed among the users a lack of 
independent personality, criticism, savvy, self-reflection or creativity (Saunders 
2002).
Mr. Mao had a big family reunion on the Chinese New Year’s Eve. His 
family set a specific WeChat group named “Family group only for red packet 
scramble.” In this game model, a portion of the amount a person receives from 
the group needs to be sent back as a courtesy to those with whom one maintains 
an interpersonal relationship.
He and his relatives—even their kids—are in this game war. They teach 
kids how to send and open Red Packets via WeChat when they do not have 
time to check their own cellphones, thus their kids help to scramble for Red 
Packets from the group. This reciprocity of sending and receiving, results, in a 
subtle way, in the relationship becoming closer and stronger. Nels is a girl from 
Shanghai who lives in America, with her husband. She migrated there and 
started her own business as a purchasing agent. She knows how urban Chinese 
girls are fond of purchasing luxury goods from USA because the prices for 
these goods are much lower overseas than in China. Nels would go to shopping 
malls or outlet stores to search for goods on sales for her customers. She took 
nearly fifty pictures and videos of luxury-brand products and posted nearly 
74 Xiaojing Ji
fifty of them every day to WeChat Moments. Her friends shared her contact 
card with others, or posted her QR code on Moments, and also shared their 
own experience of purchasing products from Nels. This led to an expansion 
of her business. She receives about 15-20 friend requests every day, and even 
though she doesn’t know all of her customers, it apparently does not affect her 
business. All her customers send her product price fee via WeChat Red Packets, 
and in return she sends a package containing the products to them. She told 
me that her daily order income is nearly 10.000 RMB—her family dedicates an 
entire room to the storage of her goods for sale.
In fact, there are many such small internet businesses that are similar 
to Nels’. They pay no income tax or extra fees and they don’t need to start a 
company. They do everything with their smartphones and process all deals via 
WeChat7.
WeChat Red Packets are Occasionally Used Illegally
According to a Jie Fang daily newspaper report, a group of people used the 
WeChat Red Packet platform to gamble. The Shanghai Xuhui district court, in 
the first Chinese WeChat gambling case, sentenced the leaders of the WeChat 
gambling group to ten months in prison. The WeChat gambling group had 
two hundred members. The rule of their gambling was for each one to send 
a random-amount Red Packet worth 288 RMB. After that, the group member 
who drew the lowest amount due was required to send a next round of Red 
Packets and so on, while the group leader got a 28 RMB commission fee from 
each transaction. The group sent about 500 Red Packets with a total value of 
100.000 RMB. Members of this group averaged twenty-six years of age. One 
police officer said that the four main criminals didn’t realize that what they 
were doing is illegal until the police got involved. Although this case differs 
from a traditional gambling case, the main features of the two are essentially 
the same, the only difference being that one is in the virtual world while the 
other is in a real life. Since 2014, instances of WeChat Red Packets sent with 
intent to defraud are becoming more common. Fraudsters send Red Packets 
carrying links with viruses designed to get personal information, the weakness 
of humanity helping them to acquire illegal wealth.
7 | After moving to Berlin, I never spoke with friends about becoming a purchase agent 
as I am not at all interested in doing that. However, when a friend asked me to buy milk 
powder for her baby, knowing of the food-safety concerns in China especially regarding 
milk powder for babies, I did her a personal—not a commercial—favor for her. She sent 
me the money to pay for the products via WeChat Red Packets. As far as I know, nearly 
every Chinese student in Berlin uses WeChat in this way, either for their own business 
like Nels’, or for their family and friends.
Red Packets in the Real and Vir tual Worlds 75
ConClusion
Westerners are cautious with wealth conversation, but Chinese are very fond of this, 
especially after experiencing a rapid economic growth period; people are exciting with 
the small amount of unexpected fortune (Interview with Craig, an American who works 
in China, March 2016). 
While a red packet is a monetary gift, it symbolizes a transfer of emotions 
during interpersonal communication; it serves to strengthen otherwise weak 
virtual interpersonal relationships. The problem arises over habit: if someone 
served you a cup of coffee every morning and a glass of wine every night, and 
so in a similar way you received red packets regularly on each festival, you 
would subsequently consider it to be an essential part of your life. People who 
are addicted to Red Packets always say, “don’t speak of Red Packets as being a 
solution”, or “if one Red Packet is not enough, then send two”. WeChat Red 
Packets have become a public mechanism to deal with certain situations: one 
sends a Red Packet as a new WeChat group member, or as a departing WeChat 
group member who wishes to say goodbye. One sends a Red Packet in order to 
ask a favor of someone—to forward something or to ask that they vote for a post, 
etc. In the social world, people tend to persist in the sending and the scraping of 
Red Packets until eventually their thumbs get tired. Mankind is so interesting 
and complicated! A Red Packet sent through WeChat is not simply a payment 
or a monetary gift, it has also become a social mechanism. The expansion 
of WeChat Red Packets is not only about how the corporations execute their 
strategy, it is also about people who we would never expect to participate in the 
Red Packets scraping war. For example, people from Hong Kong and Taiwan try 
to find a way to open a Chinese bank account in order to register with WeChat 
so that they can use Red Packets. A well-known quotation reads, “no red packets, 
no social.8” This radically new phenomenon of Red Packets, combined with the 
highly complex social application WeChat, is fast becoming a completely new 
form of gaming and entertainment in China.
8 | Tech Tencent. “Big data reading: The secret of Chinese netizen scrambling red 
packets”. (《大数据解读：中国网民抢红包的秘密》). Last accessed 1st May, 2016. 
http://tech.qq.com/a/20160229/008778.htm
76 Xiaojing Ji
referenCes
Char4u “Red Packet: Sign of Prosperity”. Last accessed 1st May, 2016.
http://www.char4u.com/content/red-packet-sign-of-prosperity/
Ke Yun (2015): “Aging on WeChat. A study of Social Media Impact Elderly in 
Urban China.” In: Journal of Visual and Media Anthropology 1, no.1, pp.8-21. 
http://www.visual-anthropology.fu-berlin.de/journal/Vol_1_1_2015/Aging-
on-WeChat/index.html
Mauss, Marcel (1966): The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic 
Societies, Cunnison, Ian (trans.), London: Cohen & West.
Saunders, Ian (2004): “10 Virtual Cultures,” in The Year’s Work in Critical and 
Cultural Theory 12/1, pp.130-142. 
Steven, Millward. “Wechat now has 500 million monthly active user”. Last 
accessed 30th April, 2016. https://www.techinasia.com/wechat-500-milli 
on-active-users-q4-2014