Which makes a better gift?

Bringing gifts when you go home for the holidays is a Spring Festival tradition. Advertisements during the season appeal to this custom; one of the most famous recent slogans is "There's no need for a gift this season, but I'll accept Naobaijin" (今年过节不收礼，收礼还收脑白金). Here's a typical ad from that campaign.

In the blog post translated below, Beijing-based critic Hu Xudong discusses how gift giving has changed over the past decade (and century):

I remember many years ago, when I would follow at the adults' heels as we went to visit friends for the New Year, I'd always help carry a jug of oil. It may have been rapeseed oil, peanut oil, or sesame oil, but it simply wasn't a New Year's greeting unless there was oil. This custom all but disappeared after the 1990s, when people obeyed those vulgar advertisements and began taking health products like Naobaijin on their visits to other people's homes over the New Year. But this year, because of the increasing price of agricultural products, oil once again became the best way to express a spirit of friendship and generosity. I went back home over the Spring Festival and saw a magnificent scene of the masses carrying jugs and drums of oil with them as they made their way along the streets and alleyways to send their New Year's greetings, and it was like I had suddenly returned to the 1980s.

The gifts of oil reminded me of Chengdu in the Republican era. The warlord Yang Sen, infamous for his many concubines, especially loved showing off how trendy he was. He knew far better than a lot of local officials today the value of "recruiting high-level talent"—he convinced a whole slew of Chinese who had returned from overseas to move from Shanghai and Beijing to serve as his secretaries in Chengdu, where they gradually coalesced into a returned Chinese secretarial pool that exceeded even his famed harem in scale. Unfortunately, General Yang couldn't afford to pay all those secretaries, so he issued an order revoking their salary. Instead, each was assigned an orderly and given a folding stool and a hurricane lantern fueled by kerosene, which they could obtain from the storehouse. This was to encourage the secretaries to "work diligently in the service of their master."

In those days, the kerosene used in lanterns was imported from the US by the American Standard Oil Co. and was a luxury product used by officials, gentry, and rich businessmen. It was extremely hard to come by on the open market, so the returned Chinese secretaries in the secretarial pool simply went back to Yang Sen's storehouse again and again to obtain kerosene under the pretense of "working diligently." Then they re-sold it on the outside. They drew no salary, but they lived very well nonetheless. And when the Spring Festival came around, those secretaries had no need to worry about gifts: they just swaggered off to pay their New Year's respects carrying American Standard kerosene. So the people of Chengdu called that secretarial pool "the kerosene secretaries."

Today, you can still see the descendants of those "kerosene secretaries." A buddy of mine told me that because the price of gas has remained high, giving gasoline has become the best confirmation of brotherhood among friends with cars during the Spring Festival season. Indeed, "There's no need for a gift this season, but I'll accept 93 or 97 octane." A lot of his friends who work at a certain state-owned enterprise don't draw very high salaries, but they get compensated for any gas purchases. So they go in together on a tanker's worth of gas and then go from house to house making deliveries to their buddies as a New Year's gift.