The Holiday That Wasn't

The Holiday That Wasn't
There is a new holiday policy in China starting this spring. I had heard last fall in the local media that the idea was being discussed, but I suspect in fact this report was just a kind of trial balloon and the real decision was a done deal long before.

In a nutshell, the new policy takes the former one-week International Workers holiday centered on May First and reduces it to a 2-day holiday and creates 3 new one-day official holidays on traditional Chinese festivals: Qing Ming, the Dragon Boat Festival, and the Mid-Autumn Festival. The Western New Year's Day (January First), the Spring Festival, and the National Holiday are the other major holidays. In recent decades, the 3 new holidays were probably not much noted by people with the exception of the Mid-Autumn Festival when people exchange moon cakes.

It's probably pretty safe to say that the biggest holidays of the year will remain the Spring Festival and the National holiday because they are the longest in duration and each serves its own purpose. The former, it's safe to say, is the strongest traditional holiday—like Christmas in the US—a time when families come together and make special food, give the house a ritual cleaning, buy new clothes, etc. Even now, though families are now more often separated for reasons of work and career, they make heroic efforts to get back together, as witnessed by the huge backlog of travelers in the spring of 2008 when massive snow and ice storms hit the country. The National Holiday, on the other hand, serves the purposes of the CCP, so it will also continue to get strong attention to remind the populace of the nation-saving function of the Party in order to underscore its legitimacy to rule.

I confess to having a bad attitude about the Qing Ming holiday for very personal and selfish reasons—I lost a whole week of vacation that I was hoping to spend traveling to the Northwest of China, an area which I have never visited before. Beyond that the Foreign Language Department has made me reschedule all the classes I would normally teach on these "holidays" so that the cycle of classes that students get will not be broken. I know that the other 2 Chinese professors who are teaching writing with me needed to reschedule their classes too, but I'd be very surprised to find out that anyone else in the department has done so, with the excpetion of the other foreign teachers, who, I know, did reschedule theirs too even though it wasn't required.

What this return to tradition is mostly about, in my view, is the fact that with all the "development" and "modernization" going on (aka: capitalist profit making) there has been criticism from some quarters that traditional things are being lost left and right as people, young people in particular, have little time for anything beyond the the pursuit of money and career. In the local newspaper last fall there was a long article about the Mid-Autumn Festival having just become the "Moon Cake Festival," a time when people buy various kinds of expensive moon cakes without any recollection of the traditional meaning of the celebration, which, according to the article, connects the Chinese people with nature. The author went to great lengths to explain how China is a country connected to nature where traditional festivals have to do with the passing of seasons and agricultural cycles, etc. (I wonder whether he was writing his essay by hand after getting in from a sweaty day of hoeing or at his computer in some nice urban air-conditioned office.) Now it's just all about gift giving and money and trips to the local department stores. Well, duh, what else would one expect in a country where everything is now about profit making after all? (Does this remind one of another country that many readers and this writer might be familiar with?) Similar comments were made in articles about Christmas and Valentine's day at the very same time it was reported that local businesses were going full tilt trying to sell as much junk as they could and doing so more and more successfully every year, thank you.

Qing Ming literally means "clear bright" and it is sometimes translated at Tomb Sweeping Day because on this day all filial descendents are supposed to go to the graves of their ancestors and clean them off and in traditional times make offerings to their rememberence. On the holiday itself I took the opportunity to walk off campus with my camera to a nearby graveyard that had maybe about 30 traditional graves consisting of mounds of soil with yellow paper and a few stones at one side. I was eager to see locals cleaning off the their ancestors' graves. Of course, I expected to see nothing and that's exactly what I did see. I was there a bit later in the day and there was some new yellow paper on all the graves, but it seemed to have been laid in the same way all at the same time. In a later ride around the city I also saw nothing to indicate that any recent activity around grave sites. There was probaby a blip in yellow paper sales across town, but nothing to compare to what one could make off roses, Valentine's Day cards or Christmas gifts. In capitalist economies the intensity of holidays is measured in sales volume, after all.

I do not mean in any way to suggest that nowadays Chinese people are less respectful to their ancestors, living or dead. My only point is to suggest that this newly declared official holiday is unlikely to have any effect on the issue. The irony is that the government's declaring a day off to honor one's dead ancestors flies directly in the face of any supposed anti-patriarchal values that the CCP might have left and is more likely just a sop to traditionalists and nationalists. Anyway, if everyone is out sweeping tombs, maybe they won't know if all the shit in the air is dust kicked up in the course of their filial duties or rather from runaway industries that pollute freely for profit with the acquience of the government.

During this essay cycle students are writing about culture loss in the face of modernization and development. About 60-70% of the students think culture loss is real, but those who don't point to the fact that the government has instutited these holidays. Of course, now that these holidays have been instutited, everyone can go back to pulling down as much cash as possible and leave these and all other such problems to the government or whomever. Needless to say, all stores are open and doing even more business on this day as on all other holidays. As in America, all holidays are now shopping days. There's nothing more patriotic and American that one can do than shop. I heard some people say that even on the first days of the Spring Festival this year some stores were open. This is about as unheard of as stores being open on Christmas Day back in the 50s in the US. It's no surprise either that the big push for "development" came right after Tiananmen in June of 1989. This is exactly the same weapon of mass distraction used so successfully in the US, where 81%of Americans in a recent poll say that the country is going in the wrong direction at the same time as they themselves are apparently headed in the direction of the nearest mall after another exciting day at their dead-end alienating jobs.

Another thing that startled both average people as well as the government was South Korea's success in designating dragon boat racing as one of its national cultural treasures with the UN. Many students see this as not only a result of the government's inattention to these issues but also as a wake-up call that people have been too busy with careers and the pursuit of cash to notice. So the response to this uproar was the usual window dressing and promulgations that any government would engage in to make people think that talk equals action.

I wonder if the big boys in Beijing were out sweeping tombs on Qing Ming.