Do the Chinese Need Western Festivals

Complete 9 pages APA formatted article: Do the Chinese need western festivals. The big question here is: Do the Chinese need the Western culture? Assimilation of good Western values in China would facilitate China’s development and progress, but the strong values of the indigenous culture of China should not be compromised. Legislative agencies, academia and industry should focus their attention on the preservation of the indigenous culture of China and nurturing positive Western values in the Chinese people simultaneously. Do the Chinese Need Western Festivals? China has been flooded with the Western culture ever since its opening up to the globe primarily in the late 1970s. Indeed, China’s endorsement of westernization can be traced back in time. “Historically, experimentation with political and social reform has in fact occurred in China, to the extreme that some Chinese thinkers advocated complete westernization, despite the fact that they had for decades adopted Marxist communism – ironically, a Western ideology – as a guiding doctrine” (Ng, 2007, p. 4). Working on the same philosophy, over the past few decades, China has accommodated a range of foreign festivals and gained a lot of popularity among the foreigners for that. An in-depth analysis suggests a decline in certain traditional Chinese festivals such as the Double Seventh Festival, the Dragon Boat Festival, and the Qingming Festival at the same time. One theory for the decline of native Chinese festivals is that foreign festivals in general and the Western festivals in particular have overshadowed China. An example of this is the overshadowing of the Double Seventh Festival of China by Valentine’s Day. Another example is how the Christmas Day has overshadowed the Spring Festival of China. Whether this phenomenon can be referred to as the Western cultural invasion or just assimilation is a big question today. Such a noticeable integration of the Western culture into the indigenous Chinese culture has its implications, some being positive and negative. This paper explores whether China is in need of the Western culture, the factors responsible for such an easy fusion of two different cultures in China, and the positive and negative implications of the same. The idea of adopting a distinctive set of values for economic success is not limited to China but is believed in and practiced in many other countries because it has yielded positive results for them. The Chinese political leaders have gained influence from similar claims made by Mahathir of Malaysia and Lee Kuan-Yew of Singapore who have attributed the economic success of their respective countries to a distinctive set of Asian values. Similarly, the state elites of China suggested “Chinese alternative” or “Chinese modernity in the 1990s in an attempt to liberate the “Chinese” definition in the Western-centric epistemology (Chang, 2007, p. 17). To a large extent, the fusion of the Western and indigenous Chinese culture can be explained by a change of philosophy or the thought process among the people of China. Traditionally, the indigenous Chinese festivals have been derived from the civilization of agriculture and are deeply ingrained in worship of the gods and ancestors, and exorcism. They are in an obvious contrast to the traditional Western festivals that, in comparison to the Chinese festivals, are occasions of enjoyment, freedom, and relaxation.