BEIJING - As China celebrates the arrival
of the new lunar year - the most important
festival on the Chinese calendar - in Beijing and
other glitzy urban showcases of the country's
economic miracle there is a growing sense of
cultural identity loss.
Despite the air of
excitement and festive decorations that enliven
the dreary winter scene, many are mourning the
disappearance of the distinctive folk culture and
popular religion that once defined Beijing as a
religious center as unique as Rome - a loss
ironically aided by the very same free market
forces that have propelled
China's economic success.
"We are a lost society," lamented literary
critic Zhang Ning. "All that is left is a mere
consumerist culture."
The Chinese lunar
new year dates from 2600 BC, when Emperor Huang Ti
introduced the first cycle of the zodiac. In 2006
it coincides with the lunar year 4703-4704, with
the Year of the Dog starting on January 29.
After 25 years of headlong "marketization"
and material progress, China's money culture has
all but obliterated the significance of many
traditions - like the sumptuous new year banquet,
the worship of Taoist and Buddhist deities and
gods or the traditional New Year's gifts of money
to children.
"Today, every day of our life
is like a festival, every day we can sit to yet
another banquet," Zhang said. "As for the temple
fairs - without the traditional worshipping
ceremonies of ancestors and gods what is there to
enjoy? - it is all commercial entertainment and
consumption."
In the old days, every day
of the lunar calendar had some kind of
significance marked by a ritual, festival or fair
in one part or another of Beijing. The so-called
"three thousand rules of behavior" governed
everything and most people lived in large
households.
The Chinese New Year, which
marks the arrival of spring according to the lunar
calendar, is traditionally the most uplifting
occasion for a grand family celebration.
At midnight on Chinese New Year, it was
the custom for all family members to line up and
"kowtow" (prostrate themselves) before the master
and mistress of the house. Then, during the Hour
of the Tiger, between 3am and 5am, the household
performed the triple rites in honor of Heaven and
Earth and ancestors.
After a 24-hour fast,
interrupted by a vegetarian meal, the household
sat down to a grand new year banquet where each
dish had special meaning and was symbolic of what
was wished for in the year to come.
Thus
jiaozi (rice dumpling), which is homonymous
with the ancient word for money, represents good
fortune and heavenly blessings. The pudding cake,
nian gao, stands for a lucky new year,
while fried rice symbolizes harmony and plenty.
Nowadays, however, the laborious
preparation of the myriad dishes has been
abandoned by modern urbanities with little time to
partake in tradition. For those who pride
themselves as trendsetters, and have the means,
the elaborate dinner now takes place in a
restaurant and even in a five-star hotel.
This year, for instance, the Hilton
Beijing has been promoted as the best place in
town to have the yu sheng dish, the fishy
treat, which symbolizes overflowing prosperity
because the word for fish sounds like the word for
surplus. The Eight Treasures Pudding - a sweet
dish made of glutinous rice, nuts and dried fruit,
selected for their colors resembling different
jewels - is best had at the swanky Din Tai Fung, a
chic restaurant in Beijing.
"I don't mind
the tradition and I want to celebrate but all
those days of shopping, washing and cooking before
the festival are out of the question," said Amy
Tang, who works for a foreign real estate agency
in Beijing. On the new year's eve she and her
boyfriend are dining at the Made in China
restaurant in the Grand Hyatt. "The place has a
show kitchen and we can watch all the
preparations," she said.
For young Chinese
people, who live in the new money culture, the
price of such a dinner that could well surpass an
urban worker's monthly salary of 1,200 yuan
(US$150) is hardly a deterrent.
Many
believe that China's money culture has spawned
more vicious departures from tradition such as in
the ritual of giving children yasuiqian, or
red envelopes, containing money.
"In the
old days giving yasuiqian was meant to
protect children from evil spirits," said Liu
Kuili from the China Folk Customs Society. "But
nowadays children look upon it as means of
hoarding money."
An online survey this
month completed by Sohu, one of China's premier
Internet portals, revealed that expectations for
yasuiqian had risen dramatically. Some
51.7% of those surveyed in Beijing said they were
going to give their children more than 1,000 yuan
as a money gift during the lunar festival.
Materialistic drive and conspicuous
consumerism might well be blamed for many of these
changes, but the destruction of traditional
Chinese culture in all its medieval color started
much earlier under the onslaught of ideology.
Beijing's rich culture had only just begun
to be investigated in the 1920s when the
nationalists (Kuomintang) and then the communists
began a systematic attempt to destroy it. The
nationalists, who like the communists, started off
as followers of Vladimir Lenin, sharing the belief
that to modernize China, the nation's treasury of
accumulated traditions and beliefs had to be
discarded.
The destruction intensified
during the 1950s and peaked during the Cultural
Revolution (1966-1969) when the Communist Party
demolished religious sites and outlawed
traditional folk customs. Everything "old" - from
marriages to funerals, from folk medicine to folk
music, was targeted.
In the old days, a
genuine folk tradition during the spring festival
celebrations would be to visit a temple fair.
People would enjoy performances by strolling
players, storytellers, acrobats and qigong,
strongmen who would heave a sledgehammer on a
stone slab laid across the chest of another.
Children, dressed up in red clothes to
ward off evil spirits, bought gaily painted wind
wheels or figurines made of painted dough, and
modelled on legendary characters. In the temple
precincts, stalls sold toffee crab apples,
steaming broths, spicy noodles, grilled lamb
skewers and bean porridge.
"Those fairs
were spectacular, far too busy and colorful for
anyone to hope to take everything in. Just
entering the temple compound was like stepping
into a fairyland," wrote Chinese journalist Xiao
Qian in his autobiography Traveller Without a
Map.
With thousands of more than
1,500-year-old temples and shrines, Beijing had
grown into one of China's great religious centers.
In a landmark study "Peking Temples and
City life 1400-1900", American scholar-professor,
Susan Naquin, identified 2,500 religious sites in
the city. She concluded that by the 1980s,
Beijing's great religious architectural legacy was
barely apparent. No temple fairs were held for
some 30 years of hardline communism.
After
1979, when Deng Xiaoping launched its market
reforms, the Communist Party cautiously allowed a
revival of some old Beijing traditions.
In
1985, thousands flocked to the Great Bell Temple
when it held its first temple fair in more than
three decades. Yet with success and wealth
promoted as the new secular religion of modern
China, the censored displays of religious worship
and folk religion have lost their allure for many.
"In the past 20 years there has been a
cultural revival indeed," said Wang Xuetao, a
researcher with the Literature Institute under the
Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. "Regrettably,
this so-called renaissance is driven not by
genuine respect for our cultural heritage but by
mercantilism. There is money and profit to be made
during these temple fairs, and this has become
their focus." (Inter
Press Service)
