What caused the decline of traditional festivals in China?

The spiritual connotation of traditional festivals may not find a suitable expression. For example, young people in many cities are tired of eating in traditional festivals. In fact, this is only the maladjustment symptom of the natural transformation of traditional festivals, which does not mean that traditional festivals will come to a dead end.

In fact, the history of other countries in East Asia, such as South Korea, which successfully applied for the Dragon Boat Festival as a cultural heritage, proves that modernization and urbanization alone may not make traditional festivals lose their charm. After all, many beautiful feelings contained in the etiquette of traditional festivals, such as family values, affection and nostalgia for the dead, are actually eternal and will not fundamentally change with the social structure and life form.

However, in order to keep traditional festivals alive, China people really need to do something. Because the plight of traditional festivals in China is Chinese to some extent. Since the beginning of the 20th century, China people have a mentality of changing and transforming some traditional things. Since 1950s, the government has launched a large-scale social movement to break the customs of festivals, weddings and funerals and try to replace them with new fashions. This mentality has been going on. In the 1980s, people were forbidden to set off fireworks in many cities.

This mentality and practice have imperceptibly influenced the lifestyle and mental state of two or three generations. It is in these decades that the tradition has broken. Family is the main carrier of holiday etiquette and customs, but two or three generations living in this social environment have not passed these on to their children through family, which makes their cultural instinct for traditional festivals tend to be weak. In this case, the western festival culture quickly attracted them.