CULTURAL REVIVAL
Return of the dragon
PALLAVI AIYAR
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After more than half a century of official denial, traditional Chinese festivals are being publicly celebrated again.
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China’s leaders are increasingly turning to ancient Chinese thought and culture to provide contemporary society with an ethical compass.
When the past becomes relevant again: People gather on Dragon Boat Festival Day in Beijing to read and appreciate the poems of Qu Yuan, whose sacrifice the festival commemorates.
After more than half a century of political banishment, China’s traditional cultural festivals are making a landmark return this year, with the government having designated three new public holidays to celebrate the country’s ancient heri
tage.
Last month tens of thousands of Chinese flocked to the country’s crisscrossing rivers to watch a series of boat races during the first public celebration of Duanwu or Dragon Boat Festival since the communist accession in 1949. Earlier in the year, in April, large numbers of people gathered in graveyards to sweep the tombs of their forbearers in celebration of the Qingming Festival of ancestor worship. The Mid-autumn Festival, which usually falls in September, is the third of the recently designated national holidays.
The new holiday schedule comes at the expense of the Marxist Labour Day break which has been shortened from the customary three days to a single day, May 1, instead.
Welcome change
This renewed support of traditional culture by the Chinese authorities is an about-turn from the Maoist period when decades were spent in the attempt to do away with traditional mindsets and habits, culminating in the Cultural Revolution (1966-76).
In the 30 years since China began its economic reforms, however, much has changed, reflected both in the needs of its society and the response of the government. “With so many changes in recent times, the country needs a glue to give it a sense of identity,” said Gao Wei, Vice Director of the Beijing Folklore Association. It is his belief that this glue is to be found in China’s rich cultural past. The folklorist was 10 years old when the Cultural Revolution was launched in 1966. “Everywhere people were shouting in the streets for the destruction of the ‘four olds’,” Gao recalls. The “four olds” referred to old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas, the destruction of which was Mao Zedong’s stated goal. The idea was that only by sweeping away the old could the new, progressive ideals of communism take hold. Communist values were then expected to replace traditional religion and morality, providing the ideological bond to hold society together while simultaneously legitimizing those in power.
“In those days ‘tradition’ was a bad word,” smiles Gao sadly. “Everything traditional was attacked and destroyed.” Gao’s own family suffered during the tumultuous decade. His maternal grandfather was a primary school teacher and a descendent of minor Manchu nobility. Vilified as both an “intellectual” and imperialist”, the grandfather’s house was ransacked and stripped of all its possessions including antique furniture and valuable paintings. Gao’s mother and father were labelled capitalist roaders and subjected to daily criticism sessions by Red Guards for several hours at a stretch.
“But today, more than 30 years later people realise that tradition is in fact the soul of a nation and that it is specially important at a time of great social change,” the folklorist explains.
Filling in the vacuum
With ideology no longer functioning as a moral foundation to society, the result is an ethical vacuum, filled only by mammon. “In daily transactions the whole nation lacks honesty and trust,” says Gao. “Contracts are often meaningless. Laws in themselves can’t solve this problem. What we need is an ethical basis to society.”
China’s sweeping economic reforms have spawned a lifestyle of showy consumerism, having transformed what was once one of the world’s most equal, albeit poor, societies into one with an alarming rich-poor divide. Freed to find prosperity after decades of restrictions, a get-rich-quick culture has bred corruption, envy and obsession with money while devaluing honesty.
Gao is not alone in his opinions which find resonance even in Beijing’s corridors of power. As a result, China’s leaders are increasingly turning to ancient Chinese thought and culture to provide contemporary society with an ethical compass. The growing number of references to Confucius during key political speeches is revealing.
A far cry from the times when Red Guards ran through the streets chanting “criticise Confucius,” China’s President Hu Jintao has regularly been citing the sage’s emphasis on harmony as a value to be cherished in recent addresses to senior party cadres. Indeed, Confucian values such as unity, morality, and respect for authority are being seen by Chinese leaders as the key to the country’s future; simultaneously legitimising the party’s rule by strengthening social stability and providing society with a moral framework within which to operate.
“The ancient Chinese had evolved their own ways of resolving social tensions, based on wisdom accumulated over the ages” continues Gao. What the Chinese need today, he asserts, are exemplars or models from the past, to act as guides to ethical behaviour in the present.
Gao points to figures like Guan Yu, a general under the warlord Liu Bei during the late Eastern Han Dynasty (25 - 220 A.D). Widely worshipped for centuries across China as the epitome of loyalty and righteousness until the communist accession, today the general has a revamped utility, instilling patriotism in a country where nationalism is emerging as a major legitimising strategy of the ruling party.
The recently celebrated Dragon Boat Festival similarly commemorates the patriotic sacrifice of poet Qu Yuan, a minister of the Chu kingdom during the warring States period (475-221 B.C.). The poet drowned himself in a river rather than give in to conquest by outsiders. According to folk history, following Qu’s drowning, local people paddled out on boats to attempt a retrieval of his body, throwing rice buns into the water to attract fish away from eating it.
Ever since then, the Chinese eat glutinous rice buns wrapped in bamboo leaves called Zongzi to celebrate the festival.
Last month, the public holiday for the festival saw a thriving business for Zongzi sellers. But alongside the simple traditional stuffing for the buns, haute gourmet zongzi with goose liver and abalone fillings also made an appearance in many super markets.
Reinforcing consumerism?
The reintroduction of traditional Chinese holidays has its fair share of critics who question the usefulness of the move. Many feel that the new holidays merely reemphasise the consumerism that is rampant in today’s China with a focus on ritual rather than the underlying meaning of the festivals.
Ling Cang Zhou, a Beijing-based journalist, even went as far as organising an online petition that called for spreading the “real” values associated with Qu Yuan: the pursuit of freedom and love of truth. “Merely declaring a holiday does not achieve this,” he said in a late night interview at a suburban Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet. “I believe that the revival of traditional festivals is currently being used to reinforce existing power structures. This is why the focus is on how our historical heroes can help ensure stability, rather than on how they can also inspire us to demand freedom,” explains Ling.
Gao was more sanguine in his response. Reviving cultural values is a gradual process, he says, in which getting mass participation in rituals that have been dead for half a century is an achievement in itself.
As he spoke, groups of senior citizens were visible in the background, engaged in a range of activities from tai chi to singing. To Gao’s far left, a silver-haired man used a pail of water and giant brush to trace ephemeral calligraphy onto one of Tuanjiehu Park’s pathways. A crowd had gathered to encourage the endeavour.
Endurance has traditionally been considered a great virtue in Chinese society. Taking in the scenes at the park, it was difficult to escape the feeling that despite the meandering turns of politics and history, in which the new holiday schedule is only the latest twist in the tale, Chinese culture will always find a way to endure.
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