China, Rehabilitating Festivals

It is to be expected that in a country with a five thousand year history, 56 different ethnic groups, and a population of 1.4 billion people, festivals will play a major part in both modern and traditional cultural life in China. Understandably a great many festivals have come and gone, most others have evolved and changed over the centuries, the combination of religious influences, cultural differences and political and economic changes across a vast nation has given China a huge range of festive traditions. Many of these festivals such as Lantern Festivals, Dragon Boat Festivals and Chinese New Year are well known and have been exported around the globe as Chinese diaspora have moved and settled. A great many festivals in China are related to their ethnic and regional origins and are hence little known in other parts of the country let alone across the world. As we shall see, an important factor in understanding festivals in contemporary China is the arrival of the Western events calendar, where Christmas Day, Valentine’s Day, and Halloween, have come to be the significant dates in the year for the younger urban population, inevitably driven by the demands of commercialism and the media.