Shanghai-based writer and teacher Tim Neesham takes an in-depth look at the Chinese New Year celebrations as the country welcomes in the year of the snake.
The furore that surrounds China’s annual Spring Festival celebrations certainly eclipses anything I’ve ever seen anywhere at Christmas in the western world. It is a highly anticipated season of celebrations, traditions, festivities, food and fireworks for countries across the Far East but for the Chinese in particular, New Year is a big deal.
Visiting China around New Year offers a completely different angle to normal life in this country. For a start, everything stops. It’s not easy to get a day off work here but for the place dubbed the world’s factory, manufacturing all but shuts down, the skies clear and roads – on a daily basis so perilous with every crossing – are deserted a la a Hollywood zombie movie.
A place like Shanghai ticks due to its large migrant workforce, but with the arrival of Spring Festival everyone packs up and heads home. This leads to what is, by some margin, the largest annual migration of human beings on Earth. Airfares skyrocket and trains are booked up long in advance as in a country this size, going by plane or train is almost always more preferable than automobile.
This leads to its own set of complications. Train companies deliberately sell far more tickets than there are seats, which leads to overcrowding usually only seen at one of Colonel Sanders’ battery farms. Getting a seat is arbitrary – as trains are so tightly packed, it’s physically impossible to stand up and stretch your legs, go to the restaurant car or even the bathroom. To combat this problem, it is not uncommon for fully grown adults to enter a long-distance train journey during the lead up to Spring Festival wearing a nappy!
That said, there is more than one kind of Chinese New Year to enjoy and this is no better highlighted than in the use of fireworks – something that’s rooted in mythology and superstition, as the ancient Chinese (who, let us not forget, were the early pioneers of gunpowder) believed the noise of the fireworks scared away monsters that would otherwise come and eat your kids.
The local governments of urban centres such as Shanghai and Beijing have tried to put a blanket ban on the general public’s use of fireworks and while this law is impossible to fully enforce, the best fireworks displays are generally found in the outlying provincial cities which enjoy much looser restrictions.
February 10th 2013 waves goodbye to the year of the dragon and ushers in the year of the snake. For many Chinese, the last 12 months (well, technically the nine months before, too) will have been a race against time to conceive in order to give birth in what they consider to be the luckiest of all the zodiac animals. This again is due to mythology and superstition, as the dragon was one of the first nature gods to be worshipped by the ancient Chinese and, in what is still a very patriarchal nation, is a symbol of masculinity and power. Incidentally¸ the dragon god allegedly evolved from a snake god and is the only mythical creature to grace the zodiac.
Indeed, such is the superstitious importance of astrology to the Chinese, people often plan their pregnancies around which animal their child will be attached to. I once heard a story from a former colleague of mine who has worked as a teacher in a junior high school in Hebei province for over 20 years. She told me that during the year of the sheep (2003) she had 88 students enter the junior high school exams but the year before, during the year of the horse, she had 136; a difference of over 50 per cent and simply because the horse is considered more desirable than the sheep.
As with any trip to China an open mind and a set of ear plugs are two of the most valuable travelling tools and this is no more fitting than during Spring Festival. But on the flip side, visitors will see an altogether more relaxed, peaceful China as most of the people who contribute to the everyday urban rat race jump at the chance to stay at home with the family, eat extensively and take a break from the world outside.
Bearing these, and many other things in mind, any travellers planning a trip to China around New Year are therefore advised to plan carefully, get ready to roll with the punches and be prepared for literally anything in what is one of the most unique celebrations in the world.
新年快乐!
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