During the Spring Festival holiday, which this year lasted from February 15th to 23rd, China regroups and regathers.
People cross the country on fast trains to join their families,
watch dancing robots on TV
and hand out red packets of crisp banknotes to younger relatives.
But above all, they gather to eat.
In a café in Fuzhou, a southern city, locals and tourists ate cheesecake and drank kombucha.
One customer ordered wontons wrapped in "swallow skin" sheets, which mash together sweet-potato starch and pounded pork.
"I really like eating," said Yu Huan, another customer, who works in fashion in Shanghai.
"It's one of the ways I obtain happiness."
This year the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) got into the spirit of things by revealing,
for the first time, exactly how much Chinese consumers spend on food.
The number emerged from a revision of the consumer-price index.
The new weights imply that food (excluding dining out, booze and tobacco,
with which it is often mashed together)
accounted for 17.2% of household consumption last year.
The equivalent figure for America was less than 8%.
These percentages confirm China's passion for food.
But they also have a less comforting implication.
China may be far ahead of America in dancing robots and high-speed trains,
but it still lags far behind on one of the oldest measures of economic development: Engel's law.