A cultural row over dragon boats
By Antoaneta Bezlova
BEIJING - A mixture of pride and prickle pervaded China's first public
celebration of Duanwu, or dragon boat festival, in over half a century.
And even as state-media reported that nine villagers had slipped from a
rain-soaked embankment to their deaths while watching the races on Sunday,
others around China found themselves torn over the festival's newly found
commercialization and reinterpreted cultural value.
After seeing it excoriated by the country's communist leaders and then
appropriated by South Korea - which recently claimed it as its own intangible
cultural heritage - the festival has been given an
enthusiastic revival by the nation's cultural trendsetters.
Last year, government officials decided to revamp the country's holiday
schedule to focus on traditional festivals at the expense of the Marxist May
Day celebration. The dragon boat festival, which falls on the fifth day of the
fifth month of the lunar calendar, was one of three traditional Chinese
festivals that were added as official public holidays.
But since the original festival celebrated the patriotism and dissenting spirit
of Chinese intelligentsia, many intellectuals are unhappy with China's modern
renditions of it, heavily weighted toward the rituals instead of its meaning.
"To revive Chinese culture, the first thing to do is to revive the courage with
which the ancient Chinese people pursued freedom and restore the glorious
traditions of our ancestors: the pursuit of freedom and willingness to die
rather than submit to tyranny," said an online petition signed by 12 Chinese
academics on the eve of the festival, June 8.
The festival commemorates the patriotic self-sacrifice of poet Qu Yuan, a
minister of the Chu Kingdom during the Warring States period (475-221 BC). Qu
Yuan drowned himself in a river to defend his political ideals and mourn the
demise of his kingdom. Folk history holds that local people were so stricken by
his death that they paddled out on boats to attempt to retrieve his body and
threw rice buns into the river to tempt the fish away from eating it.
After the communist victory of 1949, Qu Yuan has been depicted as both
patriotic hero opposed to foreign domination and a man of conscience who put
his ideals above his loyalty to the ruler of the day. But as China slipped into
the chaos of radical political campaigns in the 1960s, government leaders
preferred to forget about Qu Yuan's dissenting spirit and the festival fell
into decline.
The petitioners do not deny that Qu Yuan had a patriotic side, but believe that
another side, his desire for freedom and his refusal to submit to tyranny, has
been obscured and diluted.
Much the same happened to all folk customs and traditional culture, which
chairman Mao Zedong saw as remnants of an old feudal world that he wanted to
destroy. In the heyday of communist ideology he ordered the annihilation of
everything old - from marriages to funerals, to folk medicine and folk music.
But as communist ideology gradually lost its influence in contemporary society,
Chinese leaders after him have tried to fill the void with nationalistic
appeals for people to take pride in the country's 5,000- year-old history and
culture. Using traditional festivals as rallying points for patriotism has
served external purposes too. In recent years Beijing has grown worried about
other countries encroaching on China's cultural heritage.
In 2005, China saw the dragon boat festival nominated and later successfully
listed as an intangible cultural heritage of neighboring South Korea.
While Korean cultural officials have never denied the Chinese origins of the
festival, they insist that the inscribed Dan-je festival of the Korean town of
Gangneung is a distinctive local variation, which had developed along its own
lines for more than a millennium and more. The Korean festival is famous for
its masked dramas and shamanistic ritual performances. Celebrations last for
five days and draw thousands of tourists.
Much to the chagrin of many intellectual circles, China's own revival of the
festival has centered almost entirely on holding dragon boat races, seen as the
re-enactment of the search for the drowned poet, and on the eating of
traditional rice treats.
Zongzi - the glutinous rice buns wrapped in bamboo leaves - have become
the highlight of Duanwu celebrations in the cities where astute
merchants have sought to capitalize on people's nostalgia for their
much-neglected festival traditions.
Merchants have been quick to seize on the designation of the festival as a
national holiday this year, flooding stores and supermarkets with countless
varieties of the rice treats. Many elderly Beijingers - long accustomed to
preparing the buns at home - have seen their home-made goods shunned by the
youngsters eager to try the more exotic varieties offered at the shops.
"It is no longer about eating because it is a tradition but because of craving
new things all the time," grumbles Zhang Fang, whose daughter no longer likes
her home-made zongzi filled with Chinese jujube.
Along with the traditional zongzi stuffed with crushed red beans and
meat, sellers are offering rice buns stuffed with delicacies like goose liver,
abalone and shark's fin. Some have even come up with zongzi shaped like
the Olympic torch, naming their offerings "Torch Zongzi". Others have put
forward zongzi in the shape of the five Olympic mascots.
To some these examples of infusing the festive treat with nationalistic meaning
illustrate the problem with government-mandated efforts to revive traditional
culture.
"We are already engaged in one battle - with commercialization - to keep the
true ways of old traditions," says Wu Xiaoling, a media worker who reports on
cultural issues. "It is hard enough to fight businesses' urge to look at
traditions as money-making machines. But it is even harder to fight these
interpretations of the festivals, which serve only the needs of the day."
"We do not deny that Qu Yuan had a patriotic side, but we believe that another
side, his desire for freedom and his refusal to submit to tyranny, has been
obscured and diluted," said the online declaration on the Duanwu festival,
drafted by Beijing scholar Ling Cangzhou and signed by other liberal academics.
In their petition the intellectuals suggested that China should increase
ordinary people's exposure to the ancient sage's historical deeds by printing
his image on the notes of Chinese yuan, which currently feature only chairman
Mao Zedong.
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