The negative impact of foreign cultural festivals on the Chinese economy

Whether it's traditional Chinese festivals or various foreign festivals, their cultural connotations have been drained. We can't live without festivals, and we can't bear to see all festivals reduced to shopping and eating festivals. We need to find the backbone of mutual communication among our traditions.

Most of our traditional festivals are closely linked to the ancient agricultural production, when we say goodbye to the farming society to industrial society, the traditional festivals in the era of industrial mass production began to function in the decline of the West, Western learning, the West Festival is also rapidly in this land branches and leaves flourish, and even have the momentum of the clamor of the master! Christmas, Valentine's Day, Easter, Halloween, Thanksgiving seems to have become a glorious "Chinese festival", the shrewd businessmen's campaign plus the younger generation's blind followers are contributing to the trend - the traditional festivals are fading away and the Western festivals are in full swing.

Western festivals have come on strong, but to say that they are as formidable as the ships and cannons of the past may be an exaggeration. Although the culture of festivals in the Western world began to sprout before the birth of Christianity, it really grew after Christianity came to power. It has been more than four centuries since Matteo Ricci spread the Bible in China using Confucian classics in the 10th year of the Wanli reign (1582 AD).

In contrast, traditional Chinese festivals have not been strongly protected; after 1949, most festivals were abolished as remnants of feudalism, and the only ones that survived were the Spring Festival, the Dragon Boat Festival and the Mid-Autumn Festival, of which only the Spring Festival was included in the official holidays. It was not until 1999 that the State Council issued the "Measures for National Festivals and Memorial Days" that the number was increased to 10. Such a level is obviously too low when compared with the 69 days in China during the Song Dynasty, 15 days in Japan, 16 days in Korea, 22 days in Macao and 23 days in the United States. The relegation of traditional festivals and the arrogance of foreign festivals form the most dramatic scene of the era.

People born more than 20 years ago still vaguely remember the dates of the seasons and festivals detailed on the old almanacs that turned the pages every day. Turning the pages of many current calendars, the only traditional festival left is the Spring Festival. Important festivals such as Mid-Autumn Festival, Lantern Festival, Ching Ming Festival, Dragon Boat Festival, Tanabata Festival, Chrysanthemum Festival, Shangsi Festival, Summer Solstice, Mid-Yuan Festival, Winter Solstice, Lapa Festival, and Zaosai Festival, have all faded from the calendar. Also fading are special rituals such as agricultural sacrifices, ancestor worship, deity worship, and exorcism of evil spirits to avoid disasters. Can future generations only experience those rituals, which have thousands of years of splendor and romance, in ancient texts?

It can not be denied that traditional festivals now do not suit the ingredients, but if it will be regarded as worthless immediately into the embrace of foreign festivals is tantamount to waving a sword to the palace. Festivals are not only the spice of daily life, but also a way to maintain a sense of national identity. It is interesting, but also upsetting, that UNESCO's World Teachers' Day, Teachers' Day in the United States, and Teachers' Day in Taiwan and Hong Kong are all celebrated on September 28, the birthday of Confucius, a day that we ourselves have deliberately avoided.

Why is it that foreign festivals are so popular and traditional festivals are so quiet? Scholars see this as cultural arrogance and self-colonization. Recent history has left the country with more than just endless resentment and a deep-seated inferiority complex. Backwardness and beatings have become the customary summary of recent history, and numbness, inferiority complex and even hatred have become the attitude of most people towards their own culture.

Human beings themselves are only an accidental branch on the branch of the evolutionary tree, and the iron law behind human history is only a kind of fetish under the domination of anthropocentric theories, and the process of modernization cannot be the unavoidable destination of human history, and it is even more unlikely that it can become the "City of God" that can save human beings, but on the contrary, the aggressiveness of modernization is very important to human "culture". On the contrary, the aggressiveness of the modernization process may be devastating to the "cultural ecology" of human beings. In this seemingly inescapable situation, both traditional Chinese festivals and foreign festivals have in fact been emptied of their flavor and have become mere ornaments. For example, Christmas to us here is a consumer day, or fashion labeling, not so much to the traditional Chinese holidays pose much of a threat. The real danger comes from ourselves, as warm festivals like the Mid-Autumn Festival have become a showcase for mooncake merchants and a conduit for unscrupulous politicians to engage in corruption and speculation.

Fei Xiaotong once proposed that as a world power and an ancient civilization, China should have such a cultural mindset and cultural aspirations: "The beauty of each is the beauty of the beauty of the beauty of the beauty of the beauty of the beauty of the beauty of the beauty of the beauty of the beauty of the beauty of the beauty of the beauty of the beauty of the beauty of the beauty and the beauty of ****, the world is the same. Such an ideal can also be used to express our attitude towards festivals, not to be humble and not to be overbearing. In today's serious lack of cultural identity, not changing the festival banner to make money to consume, but with a reverent heart to seriously live our own traditional festivals, this may be our duty.

An orgy of the gods under the mask of festivals

Newsweek Writer/Li Guoqing

Festivals are a part of culture, and an extremely important part of it, which defines a person's cultural identity and maintains the relationship between people and traditions in a ritualized way. In the globalized imagination***similarity, many human values are converging, and festivals may be the last barriers to maintain people's cultural identity. Maintaining traditional festivals is not simply a gesture of exclusionary cultural conservatism to resist the "invasion" of Christmas and other foreign festivals and to keep foreign festivals out of the country, but rather to prevent the tendency of globalization to cause the hollowing out of national cultural values and commercialization.

Even if we have long been well-fed, running in the well-off Avenue, no longer look forward to the Spring Festival to eat and drink a meal, and can even kiss the air in Europe at any time, the trend of Tokyo, New York's fashion, Hong Kong's Disneyland, but our thirst for festivals is still in some kind of a state of hunger - Christmas, New Year's Day, Valentine's Day, the Lantern Festival, Halloween, the festival of the dead, and so on. Christmas, New Year's Day, Valentine's Day, Halloween, Mid-Autumn Festival, Chinese New Year, April Fool's Day, Chung Yeung Festival ...... The number of festivals nowadays can be described as a deluge, but people's love for festivals hasn't subsided because we have entered the age of the gods of the "Entertainment to the Death" carnival. We are still absolutely hyper-globalized, enjoying traditional, imported and customized festivals alike.

Sociologists are disturbed by the fact that, at least superficially, traditional festivals are on their last legs, while imported ones are on the ascendancy, a situation that naturally leads to deafening declarations of "defense of the Chinese New Year" by know-it-alls!

The Chinese festival

"The so-called festival is a day when everyone puts down their work, puts down their worries, and gathers together happily. Singing, dancing, and more importantly, eating and drinking. Of course, for people like me who don't like to get together, the festival is even a good day for reading." Shen Hongfei wrote an article, "Over the Festival," which begins by talking about the spiritual significance of the festival.

Some of this interpretation is as plain as water, singing and dancing, there is a magnificent spiritual significance, but the only thing missing is the material significance of the impact of the desire to consume, it is difficult to pierce the kernel of the festival in China, for the Chinese people who like the new and hate the old, the significance of the festival is not static, but also accompanied by the whole of the Supergirl or Jay Chou's lisping voice of the song with the times.

The significance of festivals before the reform and opening up of China is not the same as it is today. If you ask any old man over the age of 60, he will tell you that the significance of the Spring Festival is that you can wear new clothes and eat a lot of meat and fish. Ask anyone who was born in the 60s or 70s and they will tell you that the meaning of Chinese New Year is to set off firecrackers, have a Chinese New Year Gala, and go home for the New Year. Ask anyone from the 80s and they'll tell you that the meaning of Chinese New Year is relaxing, traveling, playing video games, and collecting New Year's money.

As the world dons a funny Santa hat, it is also a metaphor for the decline of Chinese festivals. I searched Google and found 20 important traditional Chinese festivals, including Zhonghe (February 2), Shangsi (March 3), Tian Kuang (June 6), Summer Solstice, Tanabata and Winter Solstice, etc. I'm sure many people have rarely heard of these festivals, let alone participated in them and had fun at them.

So experts are anxious that modern people have lost their traditions. Because these festivals and my generation of Chinese heirs, dragon sons and grandsons have inherited origins, for example, with the sun and moon seasonal rendezvous related to the Spring Festival, Spring Festival, Lantern Festival, in the festival, on the Si Festival, Qingming Festival, Tian Kuang Festival, Summer Solstice Festival, Tanabata Festival, Mid-Autumn Festival ...... and the seventh day of the first month of the first day of the month of the "People Sheng Festival The "Ren Sheng Festival" on the seventh day of the first month of the lunar calendar, the "Buddha Bathing Festival" on the eighth day of the fourth month of the lunar calendar (Sakyamuni's birthday), the "Zhongyuan Festival" on the fifteenth day of the seventh month of the lunar calendar (Ghost Festival), and the "Xiayuan Festival" on the fifteenth day of the tenth month of the lunar calendar (ShuiGuanDiDiDi's birthday) are all derived from Chinese culture, but they are also derived from Chinese culture. " on the other hand, are derived from Chinese legends, myths and religions.

Thus, from the root of the analysis, the Chinese traditional festivals and even the development of inheritance, are rooted in millenniums of farming civilization, also in line with the experts generously stated three major characteristics: the Chinese lunar calendar for the service of agricultural production for the carving out of a specific seasonal nodes; the Chinese people highly respected the "unity of mankind and the sky" philosophical thinking. Excluded these seasonal nodes of the ancients of the externality and contingency, and give them more metaphysical significance; for the feudal society of successive generations of the ruling class respected the use of the Confucian ethical doctrine enriched the social basis of the festival and the practical significance of the implementation of the form. And with the obsolescence of these factors with specific historical content, the cultural symbolism of traditional festivals also came to the fore.

Defending the Spring Festival is a way of preserving the cultural dignity and identity of the Chinese people

Gao Youpeng, a renowned folklore expert and deputy director of the Yellow River Civilization Research Center at Henan University, held a presentation titled "Defending the Spring Festival Manifesto" at the university on Christmas eve in 2005. According to a reporter who was present at the event, the well-planned presentation did not attract strong interest from campus students, with only a hundred or so people attending the event at the university, which has more than 10,000 students.

New Weekly:In addition to the Spring Festival, there are other traditional festivals in China, such as the Zhonghe Festival, Shangsi Festival, and Tian Kuang Festival, which were not well known even before the Western festivals entered China. What is the problem?

Gao Youpeng: The ones you just mentioned are among the most important traditional festivals in China, totaling about 20 or so. If you add up all the festivals, there are more than 300 of them, and even the 24 solar terms are counted as festivals. But it is true that almost no one knows they exist. It should be said that once a traditional festival becomes a symbolic system of culture, it possesses a special festival function that can support its development at a certain stage. There are many reasons for their weakness, but I think the most important one is that in the past 100 years, China has gone through a transition from an agrarian society to an industrial society, and the mental state of Chinese people has become more materialistic. The function of "spiritual catharsis" that traditional festivals focus on is no longer so important, and it is difficult for people to feel as strongly about them as they used to, while foreign festivals have squeezed in at this time in the form of commercial economy, and it is easy to seize the vacancies. Now, all the festivals in China have become holidays, and they can be done any way you like, without any culture.

New Weekly:There is a view that this is the inevitable result of social development. China is influencing the world, and the world is changing China. Traditional festivals are falling behind in a fair competition with foreign cultures.

Gao Youpeng:This argument is certainly not valid. First of all, I would like to emphasize that I don't think that all Chinese people who celebrate Christmas are blind and pander to foreigners. The pursuit of novelty is human nature, and over-protecting traditions can have a negative effect. However, folklore and traditions are not mere cultural forms, but systems, which sustain the history and cultural memory of the nation. As an example, I have lived in a building for several years, but I still don't know what my neighbor's name is. This is because both he and I are missing some proper traditions and customs, so that we lack values ****ing and cultural identity, so we don't interact with each other. The whole point of Chinese New Year is that it provides an opportunity for all Chinese people to get together and experience Chinese cultural connotations and national consciousness, and to draw each other closer. Christmas, on the other hand, is not part of the Chinese cultural system, and it is impossible to find a sense of belonging there. After all the commotion, the relationship between people remains loose and cold. In any country, national festivals are definitely the most valued, only China's traditional festivals are declining more and more under the negative influence of globalization, which is definitely not an inevitable result of social development.

Newsweek: What kind of festival is a free choice for ordinary people, so do we have to "protect" them from choosing traditional festivals?

Gao Youpeng:I said in the Manifesto: "If you want to destroy your country, you must first destroy its history". Some people may think it's a big deal and overstated, but I do have this concern. Protecting the Spring Festival is just an opportunity, what really needs to be preserved is the cultural dignity and identity of the Chinese people. You can imagine, one day all Chinese people run to go to foreign festivals, no one cares about the Spring Festival, if it really comes to that time, I guess our culture will fall apart.

New Weekly:In the same context, Japan and South Korea have done a good job of protecting their traditions. What do you think?

Gao Youpeng: Japanese and South Korean people have passed the impulsive and impetuous period, while Chinese people are still in the stage of nonchalance and irrationality, with insufficient self-confidence and no correct estimation of the value of their own culture. Therefore, the declaration of the "Dragon Boat Festival" as a world cultural heritage will be the Koreans.

New Weekly:Putting aside the cultural factor, do you think it is possible for people to regain interest in the Spring Festival?

Gao Youpeng:Redevelopment of the Spring Festival will be a long process. Foreign festivals, such as Christmas, are full of rituals, with symbols like Christmas trees, Christmas hats and choirs that make them quickly infectious. China's traditional festivals do not have enough props and symbols, so the Chinese New Year crowd has basically been cut off. It's a big challenge at the moment to revive Chinese people's memories of the Spring Festival.