A modest holiday product — red spring couplets sold at single‑digit prices on a popular livestream — has been recast online as a moral crime: “taking people’s bread.” The controversy centers on Dong Yuhui and his channel “Yuhui Tongxing,” which listed inexpensive couplets that, critics allege, undercut street vendors and small retailers. The sales appear small by platform standards — individual links moved only hundreds or a few thousand units compared with the tens of thousands sellers shift on dominant marketplaces — yet the story has ballooned into a debate about culture, commerce and winners of China’s digital economy.
Spring couplets are a seasonal, symbolic product in China rather than a major revenue line, and online platforms large and small add them to sprawling festival inventories alongside food, gifts and decorations. Many families obtain couplets from workplaces, community drives or call on acquaintances with calligraphic skill; the retail market is fragmented. The livestream’s offering included inexpensive retail SKUs and some items set aside for promotional giveaways, suggesting customer loyalty and outreach rather than a predatory pricing campaign.
Close reading of the dispute exposes an odd mixture of commercial grievance and cultural signalling. Detractors have quoted an arcane line from the classic Liji — “those who cut ice should not keep cattle” — to accuse Dong of unfairly profiting at the expense of ordinary people. Others juxtaposed images of hunched elderly street vendors with clips from the livestream to imply injurious competition. But commentators who crafted that narrative neglected to show how modern e‑commerce logistics and factory partnerships typically bypass middlemen, lower retail prices and create demand for more factory output and jobs.
The likely business model here is straightforward and common to China’s live‑commerce ecosystem: direct cooperation between a content anchor and a manufacturer, using a livestream to move inventory and flatten margins that previously went to intermediaries. That configuration can benefit consumers with lower prices and provide factories with volume, which sustains employment and supports broader festival spending. For a relatively small product category such as couplets, the overall impact on brick‑and‑mortar sellers is therefore limited; the bigger shifts are structural and diffuse.
Why, then, the intensity of the backlash? Partly because Dong is a visible figure with a fan base, and visibility attracts attacks that can be monetized as traffic. More substantively, the episode reflects an ongoing clash between incumbent channel owners — distributors, entrenched dealers and early e‑commerce winners — and a new class of direct‑to‑consumer anchors who erode margins and control of distribution. Those incumbents, now vested interests, have incentives to frame channel disintermediation as cultural harm, tapping traditionalist rhetoric to rally popular support against perceived threats.
The dispute also sits in a broader regulatory and social context. China’s platform economy has been the target of high‑profile regulatory campaigns in recent years, and livestreamers have been both beneficiaries and targets of official scrutiny. Populist language about “grabbing people’s bread” carries weight because it resonates with wider concerns about inequality and market power; that makes cultural accusations an effective tool for political and commercial pushback. Yet treating a market actor that sells festival goods as tantamount to a government entity abusing administrative power conflates distinct categories of economic behavior.
For consumers and manufacturers the practical stakes are straightforward: livestream anchors can expand market access, stabilize demand for factories and reduce retail prices. For incumbents the stakes are loss of margin, control and predictability. For regulators and the public, the episode underscores how cultural tropes and social media outrage can be marshalled to contest market realignment, potentially inviting heavier-handed policy responses that would affect the wider platform economy.
The spring‑couplet storm is therefore less about the commodity itself than about who gets to sell, and how the terms of Chinese retail are being rewritten. The skirmish spotlights frictions that will recur as e‑commerce matures: incumbents defending last‑mile rents, new entrants scaling direct relationships with consumers, and the state watching for social consequences. That dynamic will shape how China’s vast festival markets — and the livelihoods tied to them — evolve in the years ahead.