Weekly Viz 2019-02-04

How Chinese New Year Compares With Thanksgiving

About Makeover Monday

MakeoverMonday is a social data project: “Each week we post a link to a chart, and its data, and then you rework the chart. Maybe you retell the story more effectively, or find a new story in the data. We’re curious to see the different approaches you all take. Whether it’s a simple bar chart or an elaborate infographic, we encourage everyone of all skills to partake. Together we can have broader conversations about and with data.”

Starting from Jan 08, 2018, I decided to put aside one hour on Monday weekly to create some visualization and find some insights from the data.

The datasets are published each week at: MakeoverMonday Datasets.

Makeover Monday 20190204

Today is Chinese New Year’s Eve, Happy New Year!!! 新年快乐！
This week’s topic is also around Chinese New Year (also known as Lunar New Year or Spring Festival). This is definitely a week I cannot skip. The original viz is attached below. You can also find the original artical here. It compares the number of trips, holiday retail/restaurant expenditure, and holiday TV viewership (Football Game at Thanksgiving in the US, and the Spring Festival Gala in China) during Chinese New Year and US Thanksgiving. It’s not surpirsing to see the huge difference as China has a much larger population base.

Original Viz:
You will find more infographics at Statista

My Visualization

As mentioned above, to get rid of the impact of large population base in China, I decided to normalize all the metrics by the population – The three metrics now turn into Holiday Retail & Restaurant Expenditure per capita, % of Population in the Country that Viewed the Holiday TV, and the Trips per capita during Holiday. And I tried to keep the viz simple and straightforward to understand.

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Please notice that all the visualizations are designed for desktop view, so it is recommended to view them on a desktop device.

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Insights

• Regarding the average holiday retail and retaurant expenditure per capital, in China, it’s US$75 during Chinese New Year, and in US it’s US$165 during Thanksgiving. Of course, here we need to consider the true buying power of CNY and USD as the two countries use different currencies;
• 52% of the Chinese people viewed Spring Festival Gala on the TV, while in the US, only 10% viewed the Football game on Thanksgiving. This could have something to do with the different cultural, as in China, families will typically watch Spring Festival Gala （春节联欢晚会） when they are unioning together for New Year Eve’s Dinner (年夜饭）;
• During Chinese New Year, it’s quite astonishing to see on average, each person takes 2.1 trips, while in the US during Thanksgiving, it’s only 0.2. This is potentially because Thanksgiving is more like a festival for family reunion, while Chinese New Year is not only for family reunion, but also for friends visits and hang-out.

Follow this link to find more weekly vizzes :)