Lunar New Year in the Golden State

If you are among the hundreds of thousands of Californians ushering in the Year of the Pig this week, happy New Year!

East Asian communities around the state are celebrating, with parades, festivals and family gatherings at home.

It has also been interesting to watch in recent years how businesses have worked to scoop up some of the spending around this major global holiday.

Disneyland, which draws tourists from around the world, unsurprisingly, goes big. But one story about Lunar New Year at South Coast Plaza, the luxury retail palace in Costa Mesa, has stuck with me since the days I covered Orange County.

Back in 2013, American marketers had just started to turn their eyes toward exploding wealth in China. South Coast Plaza, however, had been courting shoppers from China for years.

And although China has continued to ascend, a lot has changed since then. So last week I checked back in with Yong Chen, a history professor at the University of California, Irvine who has focused on Chinese and American cultural relations, about shopping for the Lunar New Year.

He said that while Lunar New Year was still one of the biggest travel and shopping holidays in China, there was no denying that strained relations between the world’s two biggest economies had put a damper on Chinese tourism — and spending — in the United States.

“It’s more than just rhetoric,” Chen said. “The middle class are more sensitive to economic changes.”

Chen said that in the last few years the Chinese government had cracked down on things like wire transfer limits — which he said had long existed but were infrequently enforced — and on travel for the specific purpose of buying luxury goods to resell.

The resold goods amount to “a multibillion-dollar market,” he said. “Even though millions of people come to the U.S. and to Europe every year, still more people cannot afford to come on a regular basis — so if they need a Gucci bag, it’s a lot more expensive in China.”

Still, Debra Gunn Downing, South Coast Plaza’s spokeswoman, wrote in an email that she was optimistic. The number of stores within the mall offering New Year deals or products has more than doubled in the last few years, she said.

“We anticipate that visitor traffic to South Coast Plaza through the month of February will continue to be robust,” she said. “Especially because of the trifecta of Lunar New Year, Valentine’s Day and Presidents Day weekend.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.