A state-backed publication of China suggested on Friday that the focus of China’s Singles’ Day shopping event should move from being a “traffic and sales battle” to one that is closely linked to science and technology, while also labeling the “cult of turnover” as not being consistent with the country’s new growth and development path.

The piece in the Securities Daily comes a day after Alibaba Group’s annual shopping spree, which saw 540.3 billion yuan in orders placed over the course of the 11-day discounted shopping event.

Many years of sales that beat records were achieved by the event, according to the newspaper, but said that it had also spawned behaviors such as spam text messaging of customers, unethical competition, and retailers faking discounts.

The paper said that model of the shipping event has taken such a shape that it is now difficult to achieve “breakthrough innovations”.

Platforms and merchants were encouraging “low-level” consumption by exploiting low pricing as a selling factor, which was not in keeping with China’s aims to promote high-quality growth, the newspaper added.

“The ‘worship of turnover’ is not only unsustainable in terms of digital growth but is also inextricably linked to chaos,” the newspaper said.

The report further wished that the Singles’ Day event transforms into a festival for platforms and businesses to exhibit the innovations achieved and ultimately even higher pursuits.

“I hope that one day, China’s Internet giants will no longer focus on the business of mom-and-pop shops, but will be able to walk towards space in their own private rocket,” the article’s writer said, pointing to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ and Tesla founder Elon Musk’s rocket projects as examples.

There were no comments on the issue from Alibaba and JD.com in the report.

Since being launched in 2009, its informal Singles’ Day even in China has been transformed into a shopping event with great discounts and has made the event the largest online sales incident in the world. the 11 day event in China is now much larger in terms of total revenues on orders placed than the similar Cyber Monday even in the United States.

For this year, the event organizers actually lowered the tone of the marketing campaign for the event, ostensibly because of scrutiny by regulators, as it eliminated a rolling tally that tracked transactions that had become the center of attraction of the event in the past years. The company said that this year the focus of the event was on sustainability.

Similarly, real-time sales data were also not published in its own and similar Singles Day shopping event by Alibaba rival JD.com.

(Adapted from USNews.com)