Every December in recent years, quite some people in China shouted: “no foreign festival” (bo yao yang jei) to tell people to boycott Christmas, which is increasingly regarded as a national shame. However, this year, such voices almost died out due to China’s reversal of its Zero COVID policy after the “White Paper Revolution.” It plunged the country into panic, with no one caring about non-survival matters like Christmas. Therefore we don’t have Tweets like “no foreign festival this year, but we have many Tweets of ‘yang la’ meaning ”positive,“ short for COVID-19 Positive (in Chinese, ”foreign“ and ”positive” have the same pronunciation).
Why is Christmas a national disgrace in China? The story started with the 2008 Beijing Olympics, which the Chinese believed was a sign of “The Great Rejuvenation of the Chinese Nation,” which soon became a nationwide slogan, and “defending national dignity” became a yardstick to measure practically everything from diplomacy to entertainment. Whereas modernization opened new opportunities through interacting with foreign cultures, including Christmas, the new nationalism discouraged foreign festivals in the name of enhancing Chineseness.
Cultural diversity, which always comes after successful modernization, is not an option for China. The Chinese need a target to vent their emotions to feel patriotic and blame foreign interference, and Christmas is conveniently picked. Last year, a kindergarten in China that hired a Santa Claus to hand out gifts with happy students wearing Santa hats was condemned as ideologically harmful, as if Santa were Hong Kong activist Joshua Wong.
What is more shocking is the fabrication of history. Some made it up that Christmas is quite a recent tradition originating in the joyous celebration by the British and French expeditionary force of the conflagration of the Summer Palace in Beijing in 1860 so that believers would immediately denounce the festival as a national humiliation.
Many Chinese also swear they will not celebrate Christmas after watching The Battle at Lake Changjin, a war movie that glorifies “the great spirit of the war to resist U.S. aggression” in the Korean War.
Later on, “no Christmas” became a government-endorsed mass movement. Local education bureaus issue notices banning Christmas celebrations on the ground that Western countries “transplant Western values and lifestyle into our country, causing serious impact on our traditional culture.” People are urged to report to the police if they find organized Christmas celebrations. In response to such orders, some schools made video recordings of their students pledging not to celebrate Christmas.
It happens that the birthday of Mao Zedong, a founder of the Communist Party, falls on Boxing Day. To the communists, this “Great Man’s Day” is a cultural asset to replace Christmas and promote traditional cultural values. To some extent, this strategy is successful, as evidenced by the large flock of pilgrims going to Mao’s hometown in Hunan every year to celebrate his birthday.
Of course, not all Chinese share this narrow-minded nationalism, especially after four decades of reform and opening up. Given China’s long history of cultural exchange that can be traced back to the Qin dynasty, such as the coming of Buddhism, they ask why Buddha’s birthday has been accepted as a foreign festival. They also question why the official media call on the public not to celebrate foreign festivals on the one hand and vigorously propagate foreigners’ celebration of Chinese New Year on the other. Sometimes they dare to mock the Chinese Communist Party, as in the following Tweet last year: “It’s fine we will not celebrate Christmas as it is a foreign festival, so let’s celebrate the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Soviet Union.”
As a final remark, there may be some causal relationship between “no Christmas” and “only COVID positive festival.” Xenophobia and the mindset that China should always act differently from the West supported China’s disconnection from the global mainstream, especially COVID management.
As a result, China has wasted three years under the slogan of “zero COVID” before its real epidemic outbreak came. Had China embraced Christmas, its chaos might not have occurred today.
