The number of square dancers in China is close to 100 million, mostly retired women born in the 1950s and 1960s. They are in control of their families' finances, covering health care, financial management, traveling, purchasing and other spending, resulting in a market valued at hundreds of billions of yuan.
In August 2015, the Ministry of Culture, the General Administration of Sport and other departments jointly issued the Notice on Guiding the Healthy Development of Square Dance Activities, which incorporated square dance into the grass-roots social governance system, requiring governments at all levels to actively guide and promote the development of square dance, taking the promotion of grass-roots social harmony and stability as the fundamental, and adhering to the promotion of socialist core values.
October 19, 2016 was the pinnacle of square dance teacher Meijiu's life. She sat on the judging panel with famous singers Li Lingyu and Sa Dingding at the National Dance Awards Ceremony held at the Water Cube in Beijing's Olympic stadium.
"It's not that they've lowered themselves, it's that I've raised myself," said Mijou, who wore a snowy blue dress with gold threads, long hair and makeup. She cried when the older sisters who danced on stage cried, and she cried with them.
Miku always remembered a limerick someone wrote about her -- "I don't listen to what's going on outside the window, I just want to dance, I can't afford to be hurt. The person who wrote the poem told her, "Square dancing is not ballet, and you can't possibly go up to the big time."
"This is the day I raise my eyebrows," said Mijou, looking at the blue dome of the Water Cube, thinking that square dancing's time has come.
Square dance involves 100 million people and a 100 billion market
The publicity positioning of the "national dance style list" is "the Oscars of the square dance world", which is co-sponsored by several well-known domestic pharmaceutical companies, with an investment of tens of millions of dollars, and the number of participants is nearly 50,000 people.
Square dance competitions of a similar scale have flourished across China in 2016, with the China Square Dance Industry Research Report published in 2015 estimating the number of square dancers in the country at close to 100 million, most of whom are retired women born in the 1950s and 1960s. They are in control of their families' finances, covering health care, financial management, traveling, purchasing, and other spending, creating a market valued at hundreds of billions of yuan.
So, with square dancing as the entry point, all kinds of merchants want to get a share of this huge market. According to the report, monthly sales of three types of square dance-related goods on Taobao -- audio, theater machines (note: large-screen MP4s, with middle-aged and elderly people as the main consumer group), and clothing -- exceeded 25 million yuan, and offline sales are conservatively estimated to be at least 10 times higher than online sales.
More companies see the value of square dancing as a channel. Since 2013, CITIC Bank has organized three consecutive nationwide square dance competitions to promote its "Happy New Year Card," which focuses on the middle-aged and elderly market. According to sports marketing consulting platform Yutang Sports, each competition has brought more than 100,000 cards to CITIC Bank.
In 2015, which the industry calls "the first year of square dance entrepreneurship," a number of APPs and WeChat public numbers offering square dance videos were hatched, and their business model is to aggregate crowds through the video platform and then divert them to the sale of square dance clothing and financial and health products.
Taking the biggest traffic "sugar bean square dance" as an example, from the launch of 2015 to the present, the daily active users have reached 2.5 million people.
In September 2016, sugar bean square dance announced the completion of 15 million U.S. dollars of B round of financing.