Gifting is not optional in China. It is a social language. Whether you are a multinational brand looking to build relationships with local partners, a retailer trying to capture peak-season spend, or a foreign company sending corporate gifts to Chinese clients, understanding how gifting works in China is not a nice-to-have. It is table stakes for doing business.
I have watched this market change shape for over a decade from our office in Shanghai. What it looks like in 2026 is not what it looked like ten years ago, and it is not even what it looked like three years ago. It is more consumer-driven, more digital, more experience-oriented, and it carries a domestic luxury tier that simply did not exist before.
I have spent thirteen years building GMA in Shanghai, and gifting season is where I have seen more foreign brands win, or waste their budget, than in any other part of the calendar. This article draws on campaigns we have run around Chinese New Year and Mid-Autumn Festival for clients in cosmetics, F&B, and fashion.
Why Gifting Matters So Much in China
Gifting in China is rooted in the concept of guanxi (关系), the network of relationships and reciprocal obligations that structure both social and business life. A gift is not just an object. It is a signal of respect, an investment in a relationship, and a way of acknowledging social hierarchy. Giving the wrong gift, or giving in the wrong way, can cause a loss of face for both parties. Getting it right builds goodwill that outlasts the gift itself.
The major gifting occasions in China are predictable but significant in scale. Chinese New Year (Spring Festival) is by far the largest gifting season. Mid-Autumn Festival, with its moon cake tradition, comes second. Qixi Festival, the Chinese equivalent of Valentine’s Day in early August, has grown into a real gifting moment of its own, particularly for jewelry and beauty. National Day Golden Week, Dragon Boat Festival, and personal milestones like weddings, births, and graduations round out the calendar.
The scale of this is easy to underestimate from outside China. Industry consultancy iiMedia Research puts the country’s overall gift market on track to reach 1.62 trillion yuan, around 222 billion USD, by 2027. The market was already at 1.23 trillion yuan in 2022, growing more than 9% a year through that period. Read those two numbers together and the direction is obvious: gifting in China is not a seasonal side business, it is a category with its own growth curve. Jing Daily’s reporting on Qixi found that consumers born after 1990 accounted for 72% of gifting transactions on platforms like Tmall Luxury Pavilion during that festival alone, which tells you where the growth is actually coming from.
The Anti-Corruption Campaign and Its Long Shadow
The anti-corruption campaign launched in 2012 reshaped the corporate gifting segment fast. High-end baijiu sales collapsed. Luxury watch brands saw double-digit declines in China. Premium gift boxes of hairy crabs, abalone, and expensive tea sets that had circulated as informal currency between officials and business partners became politically risky to give and receive.
Corporate and government gifting did not disappear. It changed form. Price points became more moderate. Overtly expensive gifts shifted toward items with cultural cachet rather than obvious monetary value: high-quality tea, artisanal food products, premium stationery, limited editions with a story behind them. The performative excess of the early 2000s gave way to something more restrained, though still expensive by Western standards.
What replaced the government-driven corporate segment was a much larger and more resilient consumer gifting market. Chinese consumers buying luxury goods as personal gifts for family, friends, and romantic partners now drive the category far more than business gifting does.
What Chinese Consumers Buy as Luxury Gifts in 2026
The categories that dominate luxury gifting in China have shifted toward a blend of international heritage brands and domestic premium products, and the shift is not the same across every category.
Bain & Company’s latest China luxury tracking shows the split clearly. Beauty and skincare rebounded 4% to 7% in 2025, the strongest category by far, while handbags declined 8% to 11% and watches fell an estimated 14% to 17% as buyers turned to investment pieces or the secondhand market instead. Jewelry held up better, with declines narrowing to 5% or less. If you are choosing where to put a gifting budget this year, that spread matters more than the average headline number.
Premium skincare and cosmetics are now one of the top gifting categories, particularly among younger consumers. A curated set from a luxury skincare brand is a socially safe, well-received gift across gender lines. Xiaohongshu and Douyin beauty content have made certain products culturally visible in a way that makes them socially legible as gifts. You give something the recipient has already seen and wanted, which signals that you were paying attention.
Luxury fashion accessories remain important but under more pressure than they were five years ago. Handbags, wallets, belts, and small leather goods from French and Italian houses are still high-status gifts, but repeat price increases have pushed some buyers toward domestic alternatives or the resale market. Homegrown jewelry brands and joint ventures like Shang Xia, part-owned by Hermès, are growing but have not displaced European heritage names as the aspirational benchmark.
Premium food and drink have had a real revival. High-quality baijiu is back as a gifting product, at lower price points and with more attention to brand story than before. Domestic wine, premium tea collections, and artisanal food products packaged for gifting are a meaningful category on their own. Mid-Autumn Festival moon cakes from luxury hotel brands and premium patisseries remain a stable annual ritual, and the packaging usually matters as much as what is inside.
Experiences and secondhand luxury are the two fastest-growing corners of the market. Spa vouchers, premium hotel stays, and exclusive dining are increasingly accepted as gifts, especially among urban consumers who already own the physical goods they want. At the same time, China’s secondhand luxury market grew 15% to 20% in 2025 and now sits above 150 billion yuan, with a compound annual growth rate north of 22%. It is still a small share of total luxury spend, but a certified pre-owned watch or bag is becoming a perfectly acceptable gift, not a compromise.
The Packaging and Presentation Factor
In China, packaging is not secondary to the product. It is part of the product. A gift presented beautifully signals effort and respect. A luxury item in generic packaging reads as an afterthought. This is why Chinese New Year and Mid-Autumn Festival limited editions from luxury brands sell so well: seasonal packaging turns a standard product into a culturally appropriate gift.
Brands that want to capture gifting spend in China need to invest in gift-ready packaging formats. Gift sets, special editions, and packaging that photographs well for social sharing are not extras. They are requirements for participating in this market seriously. A product that looks good on Xiaohongshu drives gifting purchases because the giver can picture posting about giving it, and the receiver can picture posting about receiving it.
Digital Channels for Luxury Gifting
The gifting purchase journey in China is almost entirely digital. A consumer discovers a product on Xiaohongshu, researches it on Tmall or the brand’s WeChat mini-program, and either buys online or visits a physical store to see it in person before paying. The physical store still matters for luxury goods, where touching and experiencing the product counts for something, but discovery and decision-making happen on digital platforms.
WeChat gift-giving features let users send digital gift cards or buy gifts directly from mini-programs and have them delivered to the recipient. This has made spontaneous gifting easier. During festivals, brands run WeChat campaigns that let consumers send themed digital gifts that unlock discounts or exclusive products.
One 2026 development worth flagging: WeChat’s integration of DeepSeek changes how gift shoppers find brands in the first place. A user with no prior connection to your brand can now discover it through a DeepSeek AI answer triggered by a search like “best skincare gift set under 500 yuan.” This is generative engine optimization, GEO for short, and it works differently from classic SEO: the AI model pulls from structured, consistent content across your Official Account and mini-program, not just from a single ranked page. Brands that keep their WeChat content clean and consistent are starting to show up in these AI answers before their competitors do.
Douyin has become the second major discovery engine for gifting, and it works on a different logic than Tmall. Tmall is intent-based: people search because they already know roughly what they want. Douyin is content-driven: a short video showing a gift set being unboxed can create the want in the first place. This is why interest e-commerce on Douyin Shop has become such a strong channel for gifting-season campaigns, particularly for brands without an established search following on Tmall yet.
KOC (key opinion consumer) and affiliate models have also changed the economics of gifting campaigns. Instead of paying one top-tier KOL a large flat fee, brands now work with dozens or hundreds of smaller creators on a commission basis, each showing the gift set to their own audience. It costs less per placement, it produces more content variety for the algorithm to test, and it reads as more authentic to buyers who have grown skeptical of obviously paid top-KOL content. The trade-off is that it takes more account management, since you are coordinating many small relationships instead of one big one.
For luxury brands, working with the right KOLs on Xiaohongshu before gifting seasons is still one of the highest-return marketing investments available in China. A post from a credible beauty or lifestyle KOL featuring a brand’s New Year gift set, two to three weeks before the festival, creates purchase intent at the exact moment consumers are looking for ideas. Timed right against the 11.11 shopping festival or Chinese New Year, the same content format can drive both awareness and direct sales.
A Case Study: Branko’s Croatian Honey and Olive Oil Brand
Branko runs a small family business in Croatia producing premium honey and olive oil, sold in Europe as an upscale grocery item. He came to us in 2025 wanting to enter the Chinese gifting market ahead of Mid-Autumn Festival, convinced that “artisanal European food” would sell itself once Chinese consumers saw it.
His first attempt, run before he found us, was a Tmall storefront with product photos translated from his European catalog and generic glass packaging. In four months it sold under 200 units, almost all to existing Croatian and Balkan expats in China rather than local buyers. The problem was not the product. It was that nothing about the listing told a Chinese gift buyer this was something worth giving. No festival framing, no gift-set format, no story a giver could repeat to the recipient.
We rebuilt the offer around a Mid-Autumn gift box: honey and olive oil paired with a small booklet explaining the family’s three generations of production in Croatian olive groves, in Mandarin, with the kind of provenance story Chinese gift buyers respond to for premium food. We repackaged into a red-and-gold box that photographed well, priced it as a single gifting SKU rather than separate products, and ran a KOC seeding campaign on Xiaohongshu with 40 mid-tier food and lifestyle creators two weeks before the festival, rather than one expensive top-tier KOL.
The gift box sold 3,400 units in the six weeks around Mid-Autumn Festival, roughly 17 times the volume of the original four-month run, at a price point 60% higher per unit because it was sold as a gift set rather than as grocery items. It worked because the product stopped competing as “imported food” and started competing as “a gift with a story,” which is a completely different, and far less crowded, category in the Chinese market.
Frequently Asked Questions
How far ahead of a festival should we start our gifting campaign?
Four to six weeks before Chinese New Year or Mid-Autumn Festival is the realistic window. KOC and KOL content needs time to build search visibility and word of mouth before the actual buying window, which is usually concentrated in the final two weeks. Starting a week out means you are competing purely on paid ads against brands that already built organic momentum.
Do we need a China-specific SKU, or can we sell our existing product as a gift?
You need at least a China-specific gift packaging format, even if the product inside is unchanged. Selling your standard Western packaging as a gift in China consistently underperforms. Buyers are paying partly for the presentation, and generic packaging signals the product was not made with them in mind.
Is Chinese New Year or Mid-Autumn Festival the bigger opportunity for a new brand?
Chinese New Year is larger in total spend, but it is also more competitive, with every major luxury and F&B brand running campaigns at once. Mid-Autumn Festival has a narrower, more specific gifting format (the moon cake box tradition extends to adjacent gift categories), which can be easier for a smaller brand to occupy convincingly in its first year.
How much of a gifting campaign budget should go to KOC seeding versus paid ads?
For a brand entering the gifting category for the first time, we typically weight budget toward KOC seeding in the first four to six weeks to build organic content and search visibility, then shift toward paid amplification on the content that is already performing in the final two weeks before the festival. Spending on ads before you have organic content to amplify tends to waste budget on an empty page.
Selling luxury or premium products in China? GMA (Gentlemen Marketing Agency) has worked with international luxury and premium brands on China market entry and growth since 2012. We handle Xiaohongshu KOC and KOL campaigns, Tmall and Douyin flagship strategy, WeChat CRM, and gifting-season activations that connect brands with Chinese consumers at the moments that drive purchase. Whether you are entering the market for your first Chinese New Year or scaling an existing gifting SKU, we build the packaging, content, and seeding plan around your product, not a template. Contact us to discuss your China gifting strategy.
