Retiming of Spring Festival for convenience
(China Daily)
Updated: 2005-01-20 08:32

Experts proposing a re-scheduling of our traditional Spring Festival should base their argument on sound reasons, says an article in the China Economic Times. An excerpt follows:

Passengers queue up to buy train tickets at a ticket booth in Xi'an, Northwest China's Shaanxi Province January 10, 2005. As the winter holidays for universities and colleges are coming, many students flock to the train stations or ticket booths for tickets in the run-up to Spring Festival, which falls on February 9 this year.[newsphoto]

The dates of Spring Festival, or the lunar new year, are determined by the lunar calendar rather than the Gregorian calendar, which means the holiday changes each year. Some thinkers, spearheaded by Zhang Qianwu, an expert on calendar studies and professor at Xi'an University of Electronic Science and Technology, say the constant change and working by two calendars causes problems, and they are pooling their efforts to convince the National People's Congress (NPC) to appoint February 4 as a fixed day for the annual celebration.

The suggestion seems so pedantic and so pompous that it fails to stand up to even a few arguments.

Zhang believes that as Spring Festival often comes after the "Beginning of Spring" and the "Rain Water," two seasonal starting points for spring ploughing and spring irrigation according to the lunar calendar, people are in danger of missing the best farming season because of the celebrations.

This assertion is such an insult to our tradition, which originated in the Shang Dynasty (16th century-1046 BC). Although there may not be a specific reason for Spring Festival to fall on the first day of the first lunar month, we have more doubts about these experts' grandiose ideas than for the credibility of thousands years' experience and rational knowledge.

The experts argue that varying the Spring Festival date means the beginning and end of student winter vacations are not fixed, disrupting academic schedules.

How absurd.

Zhang and his fellow thinkers say a late Spring Festival could deter the regular workings of the NPC and the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, which usually convene after the festival. To guarantee regular government working, why not change the date of the meetings, instead of the date of the thousand-year-old festival?

The experts also attribute the difficulty in planning festival goods supply and messy crowds in railway stations to the changing date of the festival. But they fail to explain how a fixed date would fix the problems.

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