今年春节近8亿人收发微信红包

Nearly 800m people went online to send money to friends and relatives over the Chinese New Year festival as technology continues to permeate even the most ancient of traditions in China.

在春节期间，有近8亿中国人在网上给亲朋好友发红包。科技继续向甚至是中国最古老的传统中渗透。

Tencent, one of China’s duo of tech titans, said 768m people sent and received hongbao, over Weixin Pay, its third party payments business, during the six day holiday period. Typically people will hand out scores or even hundreds of honbgbao: according to Tencent, one man sent 2,723 while another received 3,429.

中国两大科技巨头之一腾讯(Tencent)表示，从除夕零点至初六零点的6天里，有7.68亿人通过其旗下第三方支付公司微信支付(Weixin Pay)发送和接收红包。人们通常会发几十个甚至几百个红包：根据腾讯的说法，有一人发出了2723个红包，而另一人则收到了3429个红包。

The mass migration to digital hongbao – initiated four years ago by Tencent – highlights the explosion of making payments with the swipe of a phone in China, where even beggars accept alms by proffering a QR code to passers-by. The market was estimated to be worth $15.5trn last year, utterly dwarfing those in the US and other countries.

数字红包是四年前由腾讯首创的。朝着数字红包的大规模迁移，凸显出中国人手机支付规模的爆炸式增长。在中国，就连乞丐都会通过向路人展示二维码来接受施舍。据估计，去年该市场的价值达15.5万亿美元，完全令美国和其他国家相形见绌。

Part of the market’s growth is due to poor legacy banking – China has mostly leap-frogged credit cards, for example – but has also been fuelled by innovations like moving hongbao on line. Tencent is seeking to export the custom to other markets, including India where a customised version is available on Hike, the messaging app it backs.

该市场增长的部分原因在于传统银行业务状况不佳——例如，中国已基本上超越了信用卡阶段——但也受到了把红包移到线上等创新的推动。腾讯正寻求将这一习惯输出到印度等其他市场。在印度，腾讯投资的通讯应用Hike可以提供定制版的红包。

However, the habit is unlikely to reach the same dizzying heights as those achieved in China: in 2016 64bn packets changed hands over Tencent’s payments platforms.

然而，这一习惯不太可能达到中国当年所达到的那种令人眼花缭乱的高度：2016年，在腾讯支付平台上发送的红包金额达到了640亿美元。

Rival Alibaba has also got into the act. This year Ant Financial, its payments affiliate, said over 250 million users collected all the “five fortune cards” in its New Year’s eve promotion.

竞争对手阿里巴巴(Alibaba)也参与了这一行动。今年，阿里巴巴的支付业务关联公司蚂蚁金服(Ant Financial)表示，在春节前夕的推广活动中，超过2.5亿用户集齐了所有的“五福卡”。

But it was not just money doing the rounds on WeChat, which has almost 1bn users, over the holiday period.

不过，在春节假期里，在用户近10亿的微信上转来转去的并不只是金钱。

Users sent 230bn messages – suggesting at least some people were spending rather more time on their phones than engaging in family conversation – and shared nearly 3bn posts. At the peak 28m people were playing WeChat mini games at the same time.

微信用户发送了2300亿条信息——这表明，至少有些人使用手机的时间超过了跟家人聊天的时间——并分享了近30亿条内容。在高峰时，有2800万用户同时在玩微信小游戏。