This from today's China Daily:
While Spring Festival firecrackers have been popping and the Lantern Festival is coming up, traditionalists lament what they call the lack of spiritual content and the rising superficial observation of foreign holidays.
"Globalization, urbanization and commercialization have been erasing traditional Chinese rituals and celebrations," said Henan University Professor Gao Youpeng, who posted a declaration about reclaiming traditional Chinese values on the Web. The positive response was enormous.
Professor Gao laments the loss of tradition, and posts it on the internet! Obviously, he is right: there is no escape from "globalization, urbanization, and commercialization." Where is tradition to go?
His complaint is very familiar to Americans. People here have long worried that the meaning has been drained from Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter, etc., etc. What Professor Gao is experiencing seems to be an inevitable aspect of modernization: the cultural hollowing and flattening of traditional holidays. I am most struck these days with how fast this happens. Martin Luther King Day, which was established not long ago, has become a three-day ski weekend in the Northeast US.
There may be particular problems maintaining the traditional meaning of Spring Festival. Notice this paragraph:
Modern Chinese have been rediscovering the traditional fun of the festival about two decades after the country opened up to the world and exposed itself to many other cultures. Still, some worry that the essence has been diminished.
"Fun" is not really what the "tradition" is about. A certain happiness attaches to Spring Festival because it marks the beginning of the end of Winter in the old agricultural calender. But the central purpose of the celebration - this, at least, is my impression of 20th century practices - is to get together with family. This is a duty of sorts. Children should return home to visit with parents. Fulfilling duties, from a Confucian perspective, is not a matter of fun, but of reverence. Indeed, "fun" is a modern, largely Western I would say, concept, especially in its commodified forms. If we use the standard of "fun" to measure the contemporary observance of Chinese traditions, we have already given up on some portion of the tradition.
One last thought. Spring Festival also faces a certain disadvantage because, as a practical matter, is does not really mark a "new year." Almost no one follows the old agricultural calender these days, especially city dwellers. And I cannot imagine the PRC reverting to it any time soon. "New Year" is more firmly connected to January 1st.
I say this with some sadness because every year I notice just how wise the old calender is. At Spring Festival I notice how the days are getting longer and the sun is a bit higher in the sky, all good omens for the end of winter. Indeed, just yesterday I looked out my front door and noticed the first green shoots of our lilies starting to poke out of the ground. We have had an unusually warm January in Western Massachusetts but, even so, I saw those shoots and thought qun dao le! - Spring is here. It may snow in the next few weeks, but every day gets a little bit brighter.
Maybe, if we want to maintain more of a connection between the holiday and older traditions, we should call it "Spring Festival" instead of "Chinese New Year."
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