BEIJING - Ten doctoral students from three of China’s top universities have posted an online petition slamming local Christmas celebrations and calling on people to ‘resist Western cultural invasion’, state media said on Friday.The students from the elite Peking, Tsinghua and People’s universities railed against ‘American and European culture’ expanding throughout China along with ‘their technological and economic domination’, the China Daily said.
‘Occidental culture has been more like storms sweeping through the country rather than mild showers,’ the paper quoted the petition - dated with China’s traditional lunar calendar - as saying.
It was a ‘failure on the part of the government to maintain Chinese traditions, while encouraging the economy’.
The authors criticised retailers for using the festival to boost business and local people for revelling without knowing the origin of the occasion, the paper said.
Western festivals like Christmas and Valentine’s Day have become popular among China’s youth in recent years, but some have worried traditional Chinese culture is being swept away in the country’s headlong economic boom.
China’s Communist rulers only officially recognise one traditional festival - Chinese Lunar New Year.
Others, like the Dragon Boat Festival, are still formally marked in Hong Kong and Taiwan. — REUTERS
I don’t know whether Christmas means much to me. I’d grown up celebrating Christmas with family members but there wasn’t much of a big party anyways. It was always at some relative’s house and an exchange of presents…years of shirts, towels, chocolates…that’s it. Even with girlfriends and boyfriends of mine, it was never a really big event in our lives. I didn’t feel the relief of a public holiday either because it was always during school holidays. I worked during the Christmas of 2004 at Borders, though. I remember wearing a Christmas hat and greeting everyone Merry Christmas. That was nice. But other than that, Christmas actually holds no significance to me actually…I think I just got sucked up along with most of us in the whole hooha, and succumbed to retail gimmicks and whatnot, striving to achieve what the media keeps depicting, that everyone’s Christmas must be special and must be spent with loved ones.
Okay, anyway, so I spent Christmas eve wandering around downtown Shanghai on my own. Shanghai Urban Planning Museum, Shanghai Museum, Foreign Languages Bookstore, and Nanjing Pedestrian Street, and basically the area of People’s Square. I wanted to catch The Nutcracker at Shanghai Concert Hall, but tickets were sold out, and the scalpers refused to give me a cheap price because the tickets were too hot. Bah. I just loitered around after that.
Watched people fly kites
Watched entrepreneurs at work
Watched them get caught
Watched out for holes on the ground
Got tempted at this, but decided against it.
I think Raffles City is the only place to be done up with exterior Christmas decorations along with the soapsuds snow effect (so familiar)
Watched people go up a bus to donate blood
Streets were packed full of people. Constant choruses of whistling (the traffic police) and car horns had to make do for Christmas carols.
You see couples everywhere, but this is really interesting — there was a group of students wearing these sweaters saying “Damn you couples”, and “Go and die you couples!” in Chinese. They definitely turned heads.
So I stayed as close to home as I could get, CapitaLand’s Raffles City. Merry Christmas to all at home. Can you hear me from Raffles City, 30 latitudes away from you?
